For ReadWriteWeb's first list of top choices in enterprise cloud services, we took a cue from one of our winners and evaluated the social data stream, to see which services you talked about - and which ones got the favorable tweets, especially for customer service. Hosting companies aren't covered on this list, even if they're cloud host providers, unless they offer some form of value-add that makes their service more useful to a targeted class of customers.

Not every candidate for this list offers its own cloud platform; we considered services that are offered on others' cloud platforms. And we considered the platforms on which they're offered, too, if they presented a value-add that made them unique. Beta services were not eligible; we stuck with general availability only.

10. Xeround. This service, which premiered in late 2010, quite easily (judging from customers' comments) deploys new or existing MySQL databases on cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and Heroku. Rather than just shoving off databases into the cloud space, Xeround manages storage on the back end with built-in scalability.

The back-end storage, whose configuration is kept transparent from the user, is managed by a homegrown system that scales itself by means of virtual partitioning as opposed to sharding. Each partition is maintained on independent nodes using shared-nothing architecture (meaning, no single point of failure leads to cascading node elimination). Your database application never sees the partitioning take place, and isn't even involved; and scaling takes place with the goal of zero downtime - which thus far appears to have been achieved.

Usually a company's own predictions for the coming year are rather self-serving, so Xeround's #1 event for 2012 may come as something of a shock: "The Cloud will disappear," writes Xeround's Itamar Haber, "not in the sense that it will be gone (far from it) but rather in that that it will become all-encompassing and omnipresent. We will no longer see The Cloud as a trend or even an alternate model for using compute resources - it will become transparent as it will be the de facto default means of choice for nearly all IT-backed projects across industry sectors." I guess that makes this the last year for this Top 10 list as well, eh?

9. Bime might not have qualified as a cloud service per se, except for the clever way it serves as storage for business intelligence. It's not a particularly sophisticated data store, but it doesn't have to be for its main purpose: visualizing and analyzing data from large databases. Many businesses used to rely on exporting data to Excel for this purpose, in what often became one of the clumsier exercises in database versioning.

Bime Analytics makes itself visible to the world through interesting, if often fairly trivial, sample renderings of data that's fascinating to someone. My daughter, for example, will find interesting this "data cloud"-style subdivision (above) of the various villains that appeared in Doctor Who, organized by relative area in proportion with their appearances throughout the entire franchise history, and organized in blocks by the year of their first episode. It's an example of the Bime visualization engine putting itself through its paces using innocuous data (though I gather the Sontarans could start a cosmic war to avoid being sublimated by the Cybermen).

Essentially, Bime is a data visualization firm, which ordinarily would render it just an app. What makes Bime's business model not only cloud-centric but also more viable are two things: 1) If you're going to visualize your own data, you need a way to get it into the system. So Bime can afford to charge a premium for storage ($60/month for the first gigabyte, $120/month for up to 10 GB) since what you'll really be using it for anyway is visualization. Imagine paying $60 a month for something that only billed itself as a graphics app. 2) As my friend and colleague Pam Baker showed us last August, Bime offers an API for developers to build their own apps that utilize the visualization functionality, that in turn uses the data you're paying Bime a premium to store for you. It is an excellent business concept, and a way to use cloud resources to twist an otherwise point-and-shoot SaaS app into a viable business.

8. Okta. Almost four years ago, this service was founded with the notion of providing identity federation for a handful of familiar SaaS apps like Google Apps and online services like Facebook. Well, Facebook wants to be a major player in the identity game in its own right. Besides, simply federating single-sign-on access to an expanding list of players isn't an exciting business model when that number of players begins to dwindle.

So earlier this year, as David Strom told you in August, Okta put a new cloud-style spin on its service: In adding a new layer of Active Directory integration, it made itself into a kind of all-purpose AD app. Your single sign-on takes place through this app, rather than through some complex federation service on-premise. And because all the users in a business are checking in through one place, Okta becomes the dashboard for delegating privileges and permissions to those users. Through Active Directory, the same password that enables users to enter the network in the first place, logs them onto Okta as well.

Last year at this time, developers and administrators alike were in a quandary over how to manage the identities that users must assume in order to access multiple applications, both on-premise and through the cloud. Okta is not yet the total solution to this problem, but the fact that it has taken a serious bite out of the problem in so short a time points to the possibility of a cloud-based solution to the broader identity management problem.

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