As discussed on this thread in one of our Linkedin groups, we are starting the process of building a directory of Cloud Providers and also facilitating competitive assessment of the services they offer.

Here’s a quick draft to get the dialogue started, that we'd like to refine with crowd inputs...

Cloud Provider Profile

Data Centres

• Provides co-location services
• Owns own facilities: Locations
• Green Data Centre metrics

IaaS

• Cloud platform: Open source, proprietary
• Open API to spin up more servers and then scale them down and only pay for those you use, with an on-demand price.
• Offers discounts for upfront payment for long-term capacity.
• Provides billing granularity levels

PaaS

• PaaS catalogue

SaaS

• Categories of software
• Price per user

Technical Support Services

• Monitoring & escalations: Http status pings and response time checks
• DNS Management
• Installation, patching & configuration: Databases, Load Balancers, ..

Managed services

• Private Cloud
• Email and Collaboration

Any thoughts to add? If so chime in here or in the Linkedin group