The 25 Coolest Emerging Vendors For 2012
Coming Up Cool
Each year, CRN looks at the hot tech startups making an impact on the channel and impression on the tech industry as a whole in our Emerging Vendors list. The Emerging Vendors for 2012 list includes startups that were established no earlier than 2006 across a variety of different technology segments. CRN's Emerging Vendors know the value of good channel partnerships too; a strategy to leverage the channel to go to market is also a requirement for this listing. Here we present to you the 25 coolest startups to be included on the Emerging Vendors for 2012.
Stay tuned for a complete look at this year's Emerging Vendors as well as a breakdown of each company by technology expertise, including cloud computing, networking, storage, security, virtualization and software.
Appcelerator
Mountain View, Calif.
Category: Software
Top Executive: Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO
Appcelerator provides development tools and services that help Web developers build applications once and deploy them on several mobile devices, tablets and desktop computers based on disparate architectures. Appcelerator's flagship product, Appcelerator Titanium, is a mobile cloud platform that enables fully native, cross-platform mobile app and HTML5 web development from a single codebase.
Aryaka
Milpitas, Calif.
Category: Networking
Top Executive: Ajit Gupta, president and CEO
SaaS-based WAN optimization startup Aryaka is banking on what it calls its WAN optimization-as-a-service platform, which has been tailored for speeded-up cloud computing environments. With $15 million in funding it snagged last year, Aryaka can take that cloud WAN optimization to new heights.
BlazeMeter
Tel Aviv, Israel
Category: Cloud
Top Executive: Alon Girmonsky, founder and CEO
BlazeMeter launched in December 2011 and came out swinging with its cloud-based service for load and performance testing. And the momentum continued with the company revealing that it had raked in $1.2 million in venture funding. BlazeMeter's service is based on the Apache JMeter open-source project. It does load and performance testing for Web applications and determines how apps and systems will perform under certain circumstances. The company said it provides realtime analysis of user impact on Web apps and cloud services.
Blue Jeans Network
Mountain View, Calif.
Category: Networking
Top Executive: Krish Ramakrishnan, founder and CEO
Blue Jeans, which emerged from stealth mode in 2011, offers an online "meeting room" using its own cloud where users can schedule, host and manage their own videoconferencing, from telepresence to Skype.
Cloudbees
Woburn, Mass.
Category: Cloud
Top Executive: Sacha Labourey, founder and CEO
Want Java apps in the cloud? CloudBees' platform promises the ability to build, run and manage Java applications in the cloud, quickly and with ease. CloudBees' Java Platform-as-a-Service is aimed at enterprises and ISVs for coverage of the app life cycle from development to production.
Cloudera
Palo Alto, Calif.
Category: Cloud
Top Executive: Michael Olson, CEO
Cloudera is perhaps the most established of the young Hadoop-focused companies. The company offers a commercial distribution of the Apache Hadoop software, as well as Cloudera Enterprise, a subscription service that includes support and a portfolio of software called the Cloudera Management Suite. In an example of how Cloudera's technology is finding its way into broad use, Oracle said in January that it had integrated Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop and Cloudera Manager with the Oracle Big Data Appliance.
Delphix
Menlo Park, Calif.
Category: Virtualization
Top Executive: Jedidiah Yueh, president and CEO
Delphix, a startup that is developing database virtualization software, said in June that it had received $25 million in venture funding, led by Jafco Ventures, with Summit Partners and Battery Ventures joining in. Already investing in the company are Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Delphix says its software reduces database storage costs and improves application management. The company emerged from stealth mode in 2010 and says it has Fortune 1000 customers in a variety of industries.
Hadapt
Cambridge, Mass.
Category: Software
Top Executive: Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO
Hadapt touts its Hadapt Adaptive Analytic Platform as combining the benefits of Hadoop and relational database management software into a single data platform. The result is a high-performance analytics system that's capable of working with both structured and unstructured data. Founded in July 2010, the company raised $9.5 million in first-round funding and debuted Hadapt 1.0 in November 2011 under an "early access" program for potential customers to try out. The software, according to the company, offers "enormous performance improvements" over Hadoop and its Hive data warehousing technology. The software is available in cloud and enterprise versions. They run on all major distributions of Hadoop including Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR.
HotLink
Santa Clara, Calif.
Category: Virtualization
Top Executive: Lynn LeBlanc, founder and CEO
Virtualization management startup HotLink is a VMware partner that launched its first product at VMworld last year, but its goal is to help customers use non-VMware hypervisors. In March, HotLink launched a channel program around its flagship SuperVisor product, which allows VMware vCenter to natively support hypervisors from Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat. Sales of SuperVisor have been triple what HotLink expected when it launched the product last year, CEO Lynn LeBlanc told CRN in March.
IceWeb
Sterling, Va.
Category: Storage
Top Executive: Rob Howe, CEO
IceWeb boasts affordable unified data storage appliances with enterprise storage management capabilities. In March, the company introduced the IceWeb 7000, the latest unified storage appliance for enterprise apps based on its IceStorm operating system. IceWeb is looking to expand its channel presence by partnering with solution providers that offer cloud storage, replication and disaster recovery services.
Kaminario
Newton, Mass.
Category: Storage
Top Executive: Dani Golan, co-founder and CEO
Kaminario is a developer of an all solid-state Flash and DRAM SAN storage solution, the Kaminario K2, which was first released in 2010. It features a scale-out architecture that allows dynamic load balancing, automatic distribution of data across the system, and high availability as capacity is increased. Kaminario recently received a $25 million funding round.
LineRate Systems
Louisville, Colo.
Category: Networking
Top Executive: Steve Georgis, CEO
LineRate is a four-year-old company that emerged from stealth mode during the Open Networking Summit this past April. The company's software delivers services on top of virtualized networks and works on platforms running commodity x86-based servers, with the idea being to deploy network services much more easily without having to set up physical networking hardware. LineRate Proxy, the company's first product, is a suite of full-proxy Layer 4-7 network services providing traffic management, security and performance visibility.
LockPath
Overland Park, Kan.
Category: Security
Top Executive: Chris Caldwell, co-founder and CEO
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) are top of mind for companies of all sizes as they look to navigate the choppy waters of regulatory compliance and risk management. LockPath's Keylight software platform offers insight into GRC by correlating security information from various data sources and pairing it with regulations and policies to measure risk. LockPath was founded in 2009 with the goal of enabling organizations to make better business decisions, the company said. LockPath has teamed up with a host of partners, from security experts to cloud providers, to integrate the Keylight platform into their offerings.
MeLLmo
San Diego
Category: Software
Top Executive: Santiago Becerra, chairman and CEO
MeLLmo developed the Roambi mobile graphics and visualization application for accessing corporate systems, including BI systems such as SAP Business Objects, Crystal Reports, IBM Cognos and Microsoft Reporting Services.
Meraki
San Francisco
Category: Networking
Top Executive: Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO
Meraki began as a wireless LAN specialist but branched out into the network security appliances space in 2010 and entered the Ethernet switching market earlier this year. The company is providing wireless networks controlled in the cloud, enabling customers to use the same hosted management software, setup and controls for all of its products. Leaning on its cloud management appeal, Meraki has taken in about $80 million in venture funding and is frequently mentioned as a potential IPO candidate.
Pano Logic
Redwood City, Calif.
Category: Virtualization
Top Executive: John Kish, president and CEO
Pano Logic produces zero-client devices for virtual desktop environments. Offerings include the Pano Device, a desktop virtualization device with no CPU, memory, OS, drivers, software or moving parts, Web-based management software and more.
Pica8
San Jose, Calif.
Category: Networking
Top Executive: James Liao, CEO
Two-year-old Pica8 was spun out of server vendor Quanta in January 2012, and what's gotten it a piece of the spotlight is a virtualized switch that the company says can handle the workloads of comparable Cisco switches for about one-eighth of the price. Pica8 builds physical switches using merchant silicon as opposed to ASICs, and it plans to enable open software that sits on top of those switches.
Pindrop Security
Atlanta
Category: Security
Top Executive: Vijay Balasubramaniyan, co-founder and CEO
Pindrop Security was named one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies at the 2012 RSA conference. The company's acoustical fingerprinting technology detects fraudulent calls and authenticates legitimate callers. Pindrop claims its technology is the first to "fingerprint" individual phone calls. In detecting fraud, the company's caller-ID product identifies key attributes of any phone call, including the device, call path and geographic point of origin. Pindrop technology extracts the acoustical fingerprint and analyzes it either through Software-as-a-Service or on-premise software. In addition to authentication and fraud detection, features in the company's product include reporting and workflow management. Pindrop customers are in the financial services, telecommunications, health-care and online retail industries.
Revolution Analytics
Palo Alto, Calif.
Category: Software
Top Executive: Dave Rich, CEO
Revolution Analytics offers software and services that support users of "R," the open-source programming language for developing statistical software and data analysis applications. Founded in 2007, Revolution Analytics offers both commercial and free "community" versions of its Revolution R software. Last month Revolution Analytics issued a challenge to users of analytical software from SAS Institute, offering to convert SAS code to R for free to demonstrate that Revolution R Enterprise can produce the same results. Revolution Analytics works with a range of professional service, technology, OEM and VAR partners. In March, the company struck a deal with IBM to run Revolution R Enterprise on the IBM Netezza TwinFin data warehouse appliance.
StorSimple
Santa Clara, Calif.
Category: Cloud
Top Executive: Ursheet Parikh, CEO
StorSimple in April started selling a new series of storage appliances featuring local capacity of up to 100 TB integrated with cloud-based primary, archive, backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The new line from StorSimple ranges in terms of on-premise capacity from 10 TB to 100 TB, after dedupe and compression. One new feature, Cloud Snap, puts data snapshots on the cloud that can be used to quickly recover data even if the application that produced the data is not available. The appliances also let data be recovered to the original customer site or, in a disaster, in a remote site.
Tintri
Mountain View, Calif.
Category: Storage
Top Executive: Kieran Harty, co-founder and CEO
Tintri's co-founder and CEO wants to cut the cost of attaching storage to virtualized server environments. That's a challenge few understand better than Harty, who was responsible for all desktop and server R&D at VMware from 1999 to 2006. Tintri builds appliances that handle hundreds of VMware VMs and their storage in a single device which, to a server, looks like a direct-attached storage array. They include 1 TB of Flash memory and 16, 1-TB SATA hard drives with built-in compression and deduplication and an administration console that hides the complexity of attaching VMs to storage.
Veracode
Burlington, Mass.
Category: Security
Top Executive: Bob Brennan, CEO
Cloud security startup Veracode offers a cloud-based application security testing platform, automated static and dynamic application security testing software, and a remediation service. Veracode can scan binary code to find and fix flaws based on corporate risk management policies.
VMTurbo
Burlington, Mass.
Category: Virtualization
Top Executive: Lou Shipley, president and CEO
VMTurbo started life in 2009 with the goal of making an app for managing virtualized data centers. In these environments, demand for physical resources -- compute, storage and networking -- is constantly in flux, which makes it tough for organizations to wring the ROI out of virtualization technology. With monitoring, analytics and reporting, VMTurbo tackles the challenge of optimizing usage of data center resources, controlling resources and workloads in an automated fashion. VMTurbo's founding team came from SMARTS, a virtualization management vendor acquired by EMC in 2004 for $285 million. The deal attracted attention because 26 of SMARTS' 300 employees were Ph.D.s. VMTurbo is funded by investments from Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, as well as angel investors.
WhipTail
Whippany, N.J.
Category: Storage
Top Executive: Dan Crain, CEO
WhipTail promises to "deliver information at the speed of business" with its solid state storage appliance targeting companies looking to stretch their IT dollars in a challenging economic environment. The use of SSDs promises up to 90 percent less spent on power and cooling costs as compared to a typical magnetic spinning disk array, according to WhipTail's Brian Feller, vice president of sales and marketing.
Zscaler
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Category: Security
Top Executive: Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO
Zscaler offers its security business policy services via its Global Cloud Infrastructure as well as Web security, Web filtering, social network security, AV, Web policy management, DLP and PCI and HIPAA compliance services.