Large technology vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Red Hat, small ones like Elastra and RightScale, and even consultancy Capgemini are all clamoring to help big businesses use the Amazon.com Elastic Compute Cloud offering, or EC2.

But do they really have anything to add, or are they just part of the cloud hype? "Sure, there's some riding" on the cloud computing wave, says Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, "but there's also reasonable value."

[ Download a QuickTime video tour of Amazon EC2 |

EC2 is a service under the larger Amazon Web Services (AWS) moniker that lets companies run applications at the Amazon.com datacentres and access them over the internet. Amazon won't say how many EC2 partners are on the roster, only that "there are a lot doing all sorts of things, from custom integration with customers to offering application software on top of our services to hosting services," says Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for AWS at Amazon.

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Yet there's no question that partners -- a few, at least -- play a critical role in helping Amazon break into the enterprise ranks. Otherwise, EC2 might end up serving mostly small companies and startups with a shaky future. Amazon.com recently reported 400,000 businesses and developers have signed on to use AWS.

For small businesses, AWS indeed has great appeal. For enterprises, not so much. "Enterprises are right to be cautious," says research firm Ovum in a recent report: "A spate of service outages on the Amazon and Google platforms has increased enterprise caution about the reliability of consumer-market-oriented cloud providers."

Amazon courts tech partners for enterprise play
Hoping to turn this tide, Amazon.com touts its enterprise-flavored "strategic relationships" -- the partners who will help AWS users, for a fee, get up and running.

These "relationships" can be misleading. In many cases, they simply refer to technologies that can run on AWS, such as OpenSolaris, Oracle Fusion Middleware, MySQL, Salesforce.com's Force.com Toolkit, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Plans to add Windows Server and SQL server to EC2 are already in the works. "Some 'partners' are simply a listing of technology that's supported and certified to run in the AWS environment," says Gillett.