Abstract: Cloud computing, after its success as a commercial infrastructure, is now emerging as a private infrastructure. The software platforms available to build private cloud computing infrastructure vary in their performance for management of cloud resources as well as in utilization of local physical resources. Organizations and individuals looking forward to reaping the benefits of private cloud computing need to understand which software platform would provide the efficient services and optimum utilization of cloud resources for their target applications. In this paper, we present our initial study on performance evaluation and comparison of three cloud computing software platforms from the perspective of common cloud users who intend to build their private clouds. We compare the performance of the selected software platforms from several respects describing their suitability for applications from different domains. Our results highlight the critical parameters for performance evaluation of a software platform and the best software platform for different application domains.