Jon Brodkin of Network World pulled together a list of 10 Cloud Computing companies that they deemed important enough to watch this year. Brodkin’s list is a solid one, with each company profile containing:

• Name
• Founded Date
• Location
• Cloud Offering
• Why we’re watching it
• CEO
• How the company got into cloud computing
• Who uses the service

The 10 Cloud Computing Companies that they list (in order of appearance in the article) are:

• Amazon
• AT&T
• Enomaly
• Google
• GoGrid
• Microsoft
• NetSuite
• Rackspace
• RightScale
• Salesforce.com

The GoGrid listing is as follows:

Company name: GoGrid (a division of ServePath)

Launched: March 2008 (ServePath was founded in 2001, GoGrid development began in 2006)

Location: San Francisco

Cloud offering: The GoGrid platform offers Web-based storage and the ability to quickly deploy Windows- and Linux-based virtual servers onto the cloud, with preinstalled software including Apache, PHP, Microsoft SQL and MySQL.

Why we’re watching it: GoGrid, one of Amazon’s chief competitors in the cloud storage and compute markets, distinguishes itself from Amazon in a couple ways. GoGrid offers Windows Server 2008 instances (Amazon offers only Windows Server 2003) and 100% uptime service-level agreements (Amazon offers 99.95% for compute and 99.9% for storage).

CEO: John Keagy, the CEO and founder of ServePath, built and sold several ISPs in the decade prior to starting ServePath.

How GoGrid got its start: Executives at ServePath, a dedicated server hosting company, created GoGrid after deciding that inefficiencies within the standard hosting model could be alleviated with a self-service, pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Who uses the service: Mostly start-ups, Web 2.0 and SaaS companies, plus a few big names like SAP and Novell who are running pilots or small test projects on the GoGrid service.

I encourage you to give this article a read and see some of the other companies mentioned.