Find three regional [From Belize to Guyana] cloud service providers. One must be IaaS [must  be unique]. Detail their service offering. Other two must be unique across class. Groups of two.

This was essentially the meat of the first class assignment for this year’s Cloud Technology course.

I’ve got ten pairs of students sending in reports. These were the providers they focused on:

IaaS Service	Other Service 1	Other Service 2
Cloud Carib	Teleios Systems (PaaS)	Grupo Eximo
T-Tech (a cloud adoption agent)	CCIHosting	NAAP Global Solutions BVI (IaaS)
CP Enterprise (an IT service provider)	infoexchangeja (cloud service reseller/consulting firm)	TSTT (data centre provider)
Curacao Technology Exchange (IaaS)	Digi-Data (cloud service reseller)	Digicel Business (IaaS/SaaS)
Racklodge (IaaS)	HRplus	Scudetto Software & Design Company (SaaS)
Costa Rica Servers (IaaS)	Claro cloud (IaaS)	Rack Nation
fastCloud	HeadOfficeHeadOffice	Cariri
Link Bermuda	Secure Hosting Ltd.	Brac Informatics Systems
Global Nexus	Idea Lab's Orchid ORS	LoanCirrus
Kryonyx	IslandNet (managed services provider)	Fresh Mango

You’ll notice there are some companies from Costa Rica & Curacao there, I added in those countries after there were complaints that there weren’t enough providers to be found from BTL to GUY. I called cheese on that, but still opened up to a few more countries not typically associated with the Caribbean.

Doing this exercise brought to mind a need to create something of a Caribbean Cloud Registry. As I wrote that, the word  “Foundry” came to mind, but the guys at pivotal sort of have that locked down, I think. But the point remains, a place where you can at-a-glance see who the cloud players are and what they offer.

One of the things I wanted from those doing the evaluations was a discerning eye on whether the service providers in question were offering actual cloud services they built or if they were cloud journey enablers. As an enabler, they may have been either reselling or consulting and supporting an organization’s journey to the cloud.

Cloud enablers providing a necessary service, leading the interested to get to cloud. Without them, organizations can easily get lost in the details of implementation too soon, or make costly missteps when starting out. However, this assignment is not about them. It’s about those who are practitioners in the world of building cloud solutions. This assignment largely involves finding and understanding the context of the cloud service builders.

Not every -as-a-service marketing brochure means the seller is a cloud provider.