There are several platforms available to Systems Integrators (SI’s), Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and start-ups to migrate or develop their cloud computing solutions on. The battle between cloud computing technology vendors is to attract partners to their technology platform.

Several aspects go into the decision of platform choice including vendor experience, technology readiness, skills availability and standards support. In addition existing partnerships, trust and relationships play an important role. In the days of PC operating system market share battles, vendors who drew the largest number of applications written on their platform ultimately won. As cloud computing matures, the winners and losers among technology vendors are similarly going to be determined by who attracts the largest number of partners and that competition is brewing in the cloud computing space now. Partners already equipped with exceptional domain knowledge are of high value to technology vendors.

Last week there was an interesting announcement from Accenture on a cloud computing solution that surprisingly was not picked up by the press as much as I would have expected, perhaps since it was associated with an event in Tokyo. Accenture Digital Diagnostics Solution (ADDE) was a result ofacquisitions of Maxamine and Memetrics in early 2008 giving them a significant toe hold in digital marketing and analytics that are well suited to run on the cloud. As expected, Accenture chose to migrate this solution to leverage cloud computing. Interestingly, Accenture chose Windows Azure as the platform to run this solution.

Another announcement yesterday from FICO, the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, took an on-premise business rules engine and made it available leveraging the Windows Azure platform.Similar to the Accenture solution, the FICO solution valued speed of decisions so it made sense to move it to leverage cloud resources.

Accenture and FICO are just two solutions but such implementations lead to validation of the platform and eventual acceptance by customers. I see this as a major stride for Windows Azure by Microsoft in moving forward with their products.

If you are out looking to choose a platform to write a solution on, or a venture capitalist seeking to validate the approach of a start-up you may be funding, Day 4 of the cloud computing boot camp will be very useful to get a high level view of top cloud vendors. In addition to Microsoft, other vendors presenting their portfolios and strategy include Google, IBM, CA Technologies, Oracle, Amazon, Red Hat, SAP, VMware and Cisco.