My company spends a lot of time talking to people about the personal cloud space, including industry analysts, executives, users and many others. A common question is, "what is the personal cloud market, exactly?". For people who do not follow the industry closely, it can be confusing, given the  multitude of companies and offerings in the market.

To simplify things, we often draw a 'market map' that resembles the following:

 

It shows 'Direct to Consumer' companies and services that many people are familiar with, such as iCloud and Dropbox. It groups them into the categories of device-centric clouds, independents, backup and content, which describes how they came into being and their primary focus. In the lingo of the telecom industry, these are referred to as over the top (OTT) personal cloud services.

On the other side are white-label personal clouds solutions. White-label means that providers go to market with their own branded service. Although this may seem to be a trivial distinction, it is actually very significant, as from an end user perspective, users believe they are storing their data and content in the provider's cloud versus someone else's. That makes users more loyal (or 'sticky') to the provider.

The white-label cloud market is served by three companies, distinguished as follows. F-Secure has a history as an antivirus and security company. They purchased a couple of companies over the past few years and have used their technology to offer a personal cloud solution called Content Anywhere. Due to this technology and F-Secure's heritage, it has a backup and security flavor versus other solutions.

NewBay was independent until it was purchased by RIM (now BlackBerry) a few years ago. It was sold by BlackBerry to Synchronoss at the end of last year. It is deployed at some carriers globally and compared to other solutions, it is fairly basic.

Funambol is the white-label market leader, on the basis of the criteria listed on the market map. This is not just 'marketing speak' but the reality of the market, as evidenced by the decisions of many mobile operators, device makers and other companies who want to go to market with the best possible and most differentiated personal cloud service as quickly as possible.

Hopefully, this allows you to put different personal cloud services into perspective. This market continues to evolve rapidly, with a lot of innovation and growth, which makes it one of the most dynamic and interesting  markets in the mobile industry.