Emerging Vendors 2013: Cloud Vendors

Conquering The Cloud

Cloud computing is arguably the single most important trend to hit the IT industry in years. It's not only forcing established vendors to change their game plans, but the cloud revolution has created opportunities for a whole new generation of emerging vendors. While there have been fears cloud computing would disintermediate the channel, many of these startups recognize the value solution providers bring to the table. So check out the hottest startups in the cloud computing and managed services segment from the Emerging Vendors list for 2013.

AccelOps

Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Flint Brenton, President & CEO

AccelOps offers integrated security, performance and availability-monitoring software that works across traditional data centers, as well as private and hybrid cloud systems. Based on distributed, realtime analytics technology, AccelOps analyzes behavior patterns spanning server, storage, network, security, users and applications to rapidly detect and resolve problems.

BetterCloud

New York
Top Executive: David Politis, Founder & CEO

BetterCloud offers software for securing and enhancing Google Apps. FlashPanel, the company's flagship product, is a tool that administrators use to manage and secure Google applications. The company offers FlashPanel to resellers to manage Google Apps for their customers.

BlazeMeter

Tel Aviv
Top Executive: Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO

BlazeMeter offers a self-service web and mobile application performance and load-testing platform for developers. The company said its BlazeCluster technology makes it possible to create massive-scale load tests previously possible only in expensive testing environments.

CipherCloud

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Pravin Kothari, Founder & CEO

CipherCloud provides security technology for cloud computing. The company offers encryption and tokenization gateways that address concerns about data privacy, residency, security and compliance. The CipherCloud Platform, which addresses public and private cloud applications, secures a range of applications, including Salesforce.com, Force.com, Chatter, Gmail, Office 365 and Amazon Web Services.

Circonus

Columbia, Md.
Top Executive: Theo Schlossnagle, CEO

Circonus offers a cloud-based service that monitors networks, systems and applications, providing realtime alerting and analytics information about physical and virtual IT environments. Circonus also extends its monitoring capabilities into marketing, finance and business operations to give a view of the entire business.

ClearDATA Networks

Tempe, Ariz.
Top Executive: Darin Brannan, CEO

ClearDATA Networks provides cloud computing and information security services for healthcare providers, and for software vendors and solution providers in the healthcare market. The company's HealthData software suite is used to manage and secure healthcare applications and records.

CloudBees

Woburn, Mass.
Top Executive: Sacha Labourey, Founder

CloudBees' platform gives users the means to quickly and easily build, deploy and manage Java applications in the cloud. The company's Java PaaS targets businesses and ISVs, providing application life-cycle coverage from development to production.

Cloud Cruiser

Roseville, Calif.
Top Executive: Dave Zabrowski, Founder & CEO

Cloud Cruiser provides financial management tools that help businesses keep their cloud-computing spending under control. The software is built for businesses and service providers to gain transparency, accountability, chargeback and proactive controls of IT costs across public, private and hybrid clouds. The software lets cloud-centric businesses and users see, change, control and own the workloads.

CloudPassage

San Francisco
Top Executive: Carson Sweet, Co-Founder & CEO

CloudPassage's Halo platform provides security services in a SaaS model across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, offering cloud firewalls, software vulnerability assessment, configuration security monitoring, server account administration, file integrity monitoring, two-factor authentication, and event logging and alerting.

CloudShare

San Mateo, Calif.
Top Executive: Zvi Guterman, Co-Founder & CEO

CloudShare provides a Software-as-a-Service platform and tools that businesses use to create virtual environments for software development and testing, sales and marketing, and training. The on-demand IT environment allows programmers to collaborate across teams and develop complex applications without tying up limited IT resources.

Cloupia

Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Raju Datla, Founder & CEO

Cloupia is a developer of data center, and cloud automation and management software. The company's software includes tools for infrastructure control, provisioning, management and monitoring capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments, including private, hybrid and public cloud systems. The company was acquired by Cisco in December.

Configero

Duluth, Ga.
Top Executive: Jody Hamlett, CEO

Salesforce implementation partner Configero offers a variety of cloud-based applications and services around Saleforce's CRM system. Services include implementation, data quality assessment and migration, systems integration, business process review, custom application development, training and more.

Custora

Brooklyn, N.Y.
Top Executive: Corey Pierson, CEO

Custora offers on-demand e-marketing and predictive analysis applications that businesses use to identify customers and keep them engaged. The applications help improve customer retention by analyzing transaction patterns to figure out how customers behave and predict their future buying behavior, or what Custora calls "customer lifetime value."

dinCloud

Los Angeles
Top Executive: Kevin Schatzle, CEO

DinCloud helps businesses rapidly migrate to the cloud through its subscription-based business-provisioning services. The company's private, virtual data centers provide hosted virtual desktops, hosted virtual servers and NetApp cloud replication services, all controlled by the customer through a web-based application.

DotCloud

San Francisco
Top Executive: Solomon Hykes, Founder & CEO

DotCloud offers an application platform for developers and organizations to deploy, manage and scale their applications by assembling and customizing preconfigured stacks and services. Developers can build applications using a range of development and database stacks, with a single management environment.

Egnyte

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Vineet Jain, CEO

Egnyte develops enterprise file-sharing software, which the company said provides the speed and security of local storage with the accessibility of the cloud. Users can store, share, access and back up files, while IT has the centralized administration and control to enforce business policies.

Eucalyptus Systems

Santa Barbara, Calif.
Top Executive: Marten Mickos, CEO

Eucalyptus, an open-source software provider for building cloud infrastructure, updated its platform in late 2012 to make it easier for partners and businesses to create and manage their own private clouds. The Eucalyptus platform emphasizes self-service private cloud building.

Evolve IP

Wayne, Pa.
Top Executive: Thomas J. Gravina, Co-Founder & CEO

Evolve IP provides a range of cloud services, including virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications and contact centers. In July, the company launched its CloudNow partner program through which it offers its turnkey cloud-computing platform to VARs, systems integrators and ISVs.

Exoprise

Waltham, Mass.
Top Executive: George Nichols, CEO

Exoprise helps businesses make the jump to the cloud. With its CloudReady service, Exoprise uses a company's own data to evaluate its readiness for cloud computing. Exoprise also examines the TCO of existing on-premises applications and provides recommendations for different cloud options. The goal of the vendor's cloud-based assessment, migration and monitoring tools is to deliver the insight and controls needed to make an informed decision about moving to the cloud.

iasset.com

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Scott Frew, CEO

Iasset.com provides end-to-end partner relationship management SaaS applications that help companies cost-effectively manage their partner relationships and product life cycles. The company's cloud-based software integrates all aspects of the channel partner or supply chain business onto one platform.

IronStratus

Austin, Texas
Top Executive: Tom R. Smith, Co-Founder & CEO

IronStratus develops a line of on-demand applications for managing Software-as-a Service and cloud applications. The company initially developed its SaaS application management platform and has added tools for governance and compliance management, for identity management and user provisioning, and for administering SaaS subscriptions and license utilization.

MeghaWare

Boca Raton, Fla.
Top Executive: Shawn Nagar, Founder & CEO

MeghaWare markets a line of public, private and hybrid cloud-computing software with products that focus on both the front end and back end of cloud computing systems.

Message Bus

Corte Madera, Calif.
Top Executive: Paul Midgen, Chief Messaging Nerd

Message Bus develops a cloud-native application service that enables messaging across email, mobile and social messaging systems. Businesses use the service to deliver critical communications, transactional messages and marketing messages without the need to deploy multiple messaging servers.

Metacloud

Pasadena, Calif.
Top Executive: Sean Lynch & Steve Curry (pictured), Co-Founders

Metacloud deploys and supports on-premises, OpenStack-based private cloud systems for businesses. The vendor's Carbon/OS system is delivered as a service to a company's own hardware as a fully managed cloud service, providing high availability, automated scalability, high performance, network optimization and simplified management.

Morphlabs

Manhattan, Calif.
Top Executive: Winston Damarillo, Co-Founder & CEO

Morphlabs' mCloud products use a modular architecture to integrate compute, storage and networking to offer low-cost private clouds. In October, Morphlabs and Dell unveiled an SSD-based cloud architecture for enterprises to increase storage performance in private clouds.

NephoScale

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Bruce Templeton, Co-Founder & CEO

NephoScale is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor, offering cloud servers, on-demand dedicated services and cloud storage services. The company's technologies include the CloudScript interface for cloud management and Elastic Networking architecture.

NetEnrich

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Raju Chekuri, President & CEO

NetEnrich provides remote infrastructure monitoring and management services for managed service providers (MSPs) serving SMB customers. The company supports complex systems and applications, networks, virtual environments and cloud computing systems.

Newvem

Tel Aviv
Top Executive: Zev Laderman, Co-Founder

Newvem offers a service that analyzes streams of cloud usage data metrics and looks for potential problems or anomalies. It examines costs, security, compliance, utilization and availability by measuring usage patterns to highlight areas that require attention. Newvem calls the process "analytics-based cloud management."

Nimbula

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Chris Pinkham (pictured) & Willem Van Biljon, Co-Founders

Nimbula, which was acquired by Oracle in March, develops the Nimbula Director private cloud infrastructure management system that helps companies manage infrastructure and workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments. It includes a feature set with firewall and VLANservices, as well as security mechanisms to block and isolate traffic.

OnApp

London
Top Executive: Ditlev Bredahl, CEO

OnApp develops software that runs cloud computing systems, content delivery networks (CDN) and storage services. Products include OnApp Cloud, a cloud platform for hosts and service providers; OnApp CDN, a federated CDN platform for service providers; and OnApp Storage, a high-performance distributed SAN for cloud environments.

OS33

Brooklyn, N.Y.
Top Executive: Jacob Kazakevich, Co-Founder & President

OS33's technology platform allows MSPs to provision cloud-based infrastructure resources, publish applications, select from a catalog of preintegrated business software, activate third-party SaaS offerings and manage permissions. Managed service providers can build cloud services through the company's Master MSP program.

Oxygen Cloud

Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Peter Chang, Founder & CEO

Oxygen Cloud's infrastructure provides mobile access to storage, but its cloud security is also attracting attention. Oxygen encrypts data from core systems to endpoint devices, and offers Active Directory integration. The Oxygen virtual appliance is deployed behind a company firewall and ensures authentication.

Panzura

Campbell, Calif.
Top Executive: Randy Chou, Co-Founder & CEO

Panzura develops a FIPS 140-2-certified, cloud-integrated storage platform that enables businesses to take advantage of public cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services, Google, the Hewlett-Packard Cloud, Nirvanix and clouds based on EMC's Atmos cloud storage systems.

Piston Cloud Computing

San Francisco
Top Executive: Jim Morrisroe, CEO

Piston Cloud Computing is riding the OpenStack wave with its flagship product, Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a massively scalable private cloud OS with software for managing a private IaaS cloud so that IT managers can deliver resources internally to their organizations.

ProfitBricks

Cambridge, Mass.
Top Executive: Bob Rizika, CEO

ProfitBricks offers what it calls next-generation Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The company's virtual data center provides businesses with custom-defined instances, with live vertical scaling and double-redundant cloud storage with minute-based billing. It also developed a graphical data center designer that makes the ProfitBricks Cloud Computing service easy to set up and maintain.

Skydera

Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Lecole Cole, Founder & CEO

Skydera provides Platform-as-a-Service cloud command and control systems used to centrally manage and automate services running in multiple public and private cloud environments.

SkyKick

Seattle
Top Executive: Evan Richman (far left) & Todd Schwartz, Co-Founders & CEOs

SkyKick developed the automated Microsoft Office 365 cloud migration suite, which helps solution providers move SMB customers from legacy systems to Office 365 in just hours instead of the delicate and lengthy procedure the process usually requires.

Sokrati

Pune, India
Top Executive: Ashish Mehta, Co-Founder & CEO

Sokrati provides digital marketing and analytics services to online merchants.

Spanning Cloud Apps

Austin, Texas
Top Executive: Charlie Wood, Founder & CEO

Spanning Cloud Apps provides a cloud-based backup and recovery service that backs up data in all Google Apps, including Gmail, Drive, Sites, Calendars and Contacts. In May of this year, the company launched the Spanning Authorized Resellers Program.

StorSimple

Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Ursheet Parikh, CEO

StorSimple develops hybrid local and hybrid cloud storage technology for Windows platforms. Microsoft acquired StorSimple in November 2012.

SurDoc

Menlo Park, Calif.
Top Executive: Alex Wang, CEO

SurDoc offers an online document storage and management service, including secure and automatic backup of Microsoft Windows data files to the cloud. SurDoc lets users share documents across mobile and desktops via web browser or email clients. Last year, the company unveiled a secure document-signing capability feature on its SurDoc platform.

TwinStrata

Natick, Mass.
Top Executive: Nicos Vekiarides, Co-Founder & CEO

TwinStrata, a supplier of cloud-integrated storage services, debuted earlier this year a new Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service offering based on the company's CloudArray storage product. The service, designed specifically for VMware customers with fully virtualized IT environments, promises lower costs and simplified deployment without the need for dedicated hardware.

Vaultive

New York
Top Executive: Elad Yoran, CEO

Vaultive provides software aimed at protecting data migrated to the cloud via Microsoft Office 365. Vaultive for Hosted Exchange is an enterprise-grade encryption system engineered specifically for Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Office 365 that encrypts data in realtime before it leaves the corporate network.

Vidtel

Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: Scott Wharton, CEO

Vidtel develops any-to-any cloud videoconferencing services that provide interconnectivity and cloud-based bridging for connecting disparate video endpoints, which, according to the company, enables businesses to affordably experience business-quality videoconferencing between dispersed employees, partners and customers.

Virtustream

Bethesda, Md.
Top Executive: Rodney J. Rogers, CEO

Virtustream offers a hypervisor-neutral, public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, with optional managed services. The company emphasizes a strong consultative approach, with expertise in SAP software. Its cloud system focuses on production applications, but it also targets traditional enterprise workloads.

Vyopta

Austin, Texas
Top Executive: Alfredo Ramirez, President & CEO

Vyopta offers business-intelligence and process-automation applications for video collaboration. Its products provide operations intelligence, customer service and content-publishing automation that unleash the power of interactive video communications.

Workshare

London
Top Executive: Anthony Foy, CEO

Workshare makes a cloud-enabled file-sharing, and document-collaboration and storage platform that let users review, comment on, search, store, deliver, manage and collaborate on documents based on more than 200 file formats. Workshare merged with SkyDox in 2012.

Zencoder

San Francisco
Top Executive: Jon Dahl, Steve Heffernan & Brandon Arbini, Co-Founders

Zencoder provides cloud-based video encoding and transcoding software. The company is now owned by Brightcove.