Three clouds properties ready to burst

    Burns and Gartner analyst David Smith identified three companies that could bring the rain to any company rich enough to snap them up, and wise enough to run them well:

1) Zuora -- the Salesforce.com of subscription-based payment and billing.

    Many subscription based businesses still rely on costly and complex in-house billing systems, but Zuora offers cloud based payment and billing services for subscription-based businesses, new and old. CEO Tien Tzuo spent nine years at SalesForce.com – he built SalesForce.com's original system and served in several roles including Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. Backed by WebEx and SalesForce.com founder Marc Benioff, Zuora reportedly signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue during the first quarter of its fiscal year and experienced 102% in revenue growth.

2) Nimbula -- The private cloud company with big name backers.

    Nimbula emerged from stealth mode last June and is most notable for its pedigree: The same team that built Amazon's EC2, former execs Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, are behind Nimbula. Pinkham and van Biljon's industry cred has attracted some pretty high-profile VCs, including Accel Partners which has also invested in AdMob, Facebook and ComScore, and the legendary Sequoia Capital. So far, Nimbula has raised more than $20 million in two rounds of funding.

3) Heroku -- Building an application platform on the cloud.

    Started in 2008, the San Francisco-based cloud provider focuses on "platform as a service," a concept popularized by SalesForce.com, that emphasizes ease of use, automation and reliability for app builders. Heroku employs a multi-tenant software architecture, so one instance of software on a server can serve more than one client company. Third party add-ons let developers easily integrate additional features into their deployed apps. Heroku has received over $13 million in funding to date.

    As cloud computing continues to mature, we'll see more mergers and joint ventures, lots of overbidding and maybe even a VMWare level bargain or two. However the sector grows, as Winston Churchill said about an entirely different matter, "this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."