Emerging Vendors 2017: Cloud Startups You Need To Know
True Innovation
In a space where shattering the status quo is the status quo, it takes a lot to stand out as a cloud startup in 2017. But with businesses of all sizes continuing to move more and more of their IT processes to cloud-based systems, there is still plenty of room for innovative startups to carve out their niche and make a name for themselves.
Sure, the Amazons and Googles of the world made "the cloud" the mainstream buzzword it is today, but for startups with truly innovative tech, the opportunities around migrating customers and managing their cloud-based systems are endless.
To that end, we've identified 27 cloud startups as part of our 2017 Emerging Vendors list that are driving innovation and reshaping the cloud computing landscape.
Apcera
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Derek Collison
Founder and CEO
Apcera offers a container management platform for enterprises that are aiming to modernize their legacy workloads and securely accelerate their efforts around innovation. The platform, which it built for both legacy and cloud-native applications, provides an out-of-the-box solution complete with container workflow, orchestration, scheduling, networking and storage.
Archive360
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Robert DeSteno, Co-Founder and CEO
Focused on data migration and management for Microsoft's Azure cloud, Archive360 offers products including Archive2Azure, an unstructured data storage and management solution for Azure. The product brings benefits around scale (storage is available on-demand); security (with advanced encryption); and return-on-investment (it enables users to retire on-premises technologies).
Cazena
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Prat Moghe, Founder and CEO
Cazena automates the movement of data processing to the cloud with its Big Data Platform as a Service, simplifying the process of running analytics workloads on AWS or Azure. The company's platform bundles together cloud databases, analytics engines, data movers, security and other tools.
Dizzion
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Steve Prather, President and CEO
Focused on serving end users at small and medium-sized businesses, Dizzion offers desktop-as-a-service solutions alongside secure endpoints, application delivery and storage. The company's virtual desktop solutions are aimed at use by remote workers, particular in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.
Dome9 Security
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Zohar Alon, CEO & Co-Founder
Dome9 Security provides security and compliance solutions for enterprises that are using one or more public clouds--including AWS, Azure and Google. The solutions include assessment of security posture, threat protection and detection of misconfigurations, and the company enables greater simplicity along with a more-secure cloud environment.
Elastifile
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Amir Aharoni, CEO and Co-Founder
Focused on enabling hybrid cloud solutions, Elastifile offers technology for unifying data from numerous locations and managing the data as if it was stored locally. Underpinning the product is Elastifile’s distributed file storage technology--the Elastifile Cloud File System--which is a software-defined, flash-native solution.
Hedvig
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Avinash Lakshman, Founder and CEO
Hedvig is a provider of software-defined, hyper-scale storage offerings, which aim to protect data through replication across multiple private and public clouds. The company's Distributed Storage Platform uses block, file and object storage for multiple environments (bare metal, hypervisor and container), and offers a boost in performance as the solutions scale up.
Hypergrid
Founded: 2016
Top Executive: Nariman Teymourian, Chairman and CEO
HyperGrid offers public cloud-like services to enterprises that are running on-premises infrastructure. The offering, HyperCloud, brings together infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and applications services. All equipment and software is owned and operated by Hypergrid, and enterprises pay only for the services they use.
Infinite Ops
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: Michael Fraser, CEO, Founder and Chief Architect
With the aim of making public cloud easier to deploy and manage, Infinite Ops enables users to quickly deploy popular services onto the cloud of their choice. Infinite Ops can bundle IT services and software such as workspaces (Citrix Xenapp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Teradici Cloud Access PCoIP) with databases, firewalls, identity management and more.
itopia
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Jonathan Lieberman, CEO and Co-Founder
The Miami-based startup is among a new crop of Workspace-as-a-Service vendors looking to bring virtual desktops and other IT services to a larger market. Itopia's software, which works in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform, automates discovery, migration and management. All business goes through the channel.
Netskope
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Sanjay Beri, CEO
As a cloud access security broker, Netskope, based in Los Altos, Calif., helps businesses identify Shadow IT, analyze the threats from unsanctioned software, and implement cloud security policies. The agentless solution delivers visibility into enterprise workloads and mitigates potential security and data loss hazards.
Platform9 Systems
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Sirish Raghuram, CEO
This startup founded in Sunnyvale, Calif. by former VMware engineers delivers OpenStack cloud orchestration and Kubernetes container orchestration as turnkey solutions to customers and channel partners. Platform9's management platform looks to enable self-service deployment of private clouds built leveraging those cutting-edge technologies.
Pulseway
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Marius Mihalec, CEO and Founder
The mobile-first IT solution from MMSOFT Design, based in San Jose, Calif., helps IT administrators and managed services providers remotely monitor and manage cloud infrastructure while also protecting endpoints. Users can connect through an API to any application using a smartphone, tablet or browser.
Purple
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Gavin Wheeldon, CEO
This startup based in Manchester, UK, offers a WiFi platform that business can deploy at no charge to track the shopping habits of customers who opt to connect through social network accounts. Data ingested through those public access points in concert with analytics and marketing tools can be used to engage customers.
Reltio
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Manish Sood, CEO
Reltio, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., offers a cloud service that delivers recommendations and insights to customers based on their own corporate data. The platform combines metadata management and NoSQL graph databases to run data-driven applications and large-scale analytical workloads.
Sapho
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Fouad ElNaggar, CEO and co-founder
Sapho, based in San Bruno, Calif., helps enterprises drive employee productivity with a platform for building "micro apps" on top of their legacy IT systems. The applications, which can be accessed by employees through a modern portal, are intended to simplify workflows and accessing tasks and data.
Skyhigh Networks
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Rajiv Gupta
This stand-alone cloud access security broker, based in Campbell, Calif., offers a platform through which companies can gain visibility into their usage of cloud applications while implementing controls, adding data security protections and detecting threats. Skyhigh partners can integrate the solution with a wide variety of third-party security products.
SkyKick
Founded: 2011
Top Executives: Evan Richman and Todd Schwartz, Co-CEOs
SkyKick offers a platform engineered specifically for cloud-focused solution providers. The Seattle-based company started by specializing in migrations to Microsoft Office 365, but has since introduced a broader suite of cloud management, migration and backup solutions that can be directly embedded into customer websites and custom-built tools.
Snowflake Computing
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Bob Muglia, CEO
Snowflake Computing develops cloud-based data warehouse technology aimed at safely and efficiently storing, transforming, and analyzing business data to let businesses easily and quickly gain data-driven insight. It offers an SQL-based data warehouse designed for the cloud to support modern applications and data.
Stratoscale
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Ariel Maislos, CEO & founder
Stratoscale's cloud data center software, Stratoscale Symphony, helps businesses build an application-centric and service-driven AWS Region within their enterprise data center, including compute, object and block storage, networking, an application catalog, identity and access management, and a variety of other services.
The Sixth Flag
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: Pete Kofod, CEO & founder
The Sixth Flag provides workspace-as-a-service for global teams and organizations requiring remote desktop management solutions. The Sixth Flag Desktop allows users to access secure corporate virtual desktops from anywhere in the world, whether from a laptop, desktop, or tablet, via an internet browser with no need to download software.
vArmour
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Timothy Eades, CEO
The vArmour DSS Distributed Security System is a distributed platform with integrated security services including software-based segmentation, micro-segmentation, application-aware monitoring, and cyber deception to help organizations protect critical applications and workloads. vArmour partners with companies including AWS, Cisco, HPE and VMware to build security into modern infrastructures.
Velostrata
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO & co-founder
Velostrata provides software for moving production applications to the public cloud in a cost-effective, low-risk fashion. The company's technology decouples compute from storage, making it possible for enterprises to move workloads to and between clouds without re-writing applications, modifying images, degrading application performance. or changing management processes.
Vena Solutions
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Don Mal, CEO
Vena Solutions provides budgeting, planning, and revenue forecasting software for medium to large sized organizations that integrates with native Microsoft Excel over the web. Vena offers finance and executive teams an enterprise-class cloud solution that combines Excel with a centralized database, workflow, reporting, and analytics.
Weka.IO
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Michael Raam, CEO & president
Weka.IO provides web-scale enterprise file storage software. The Weka.IO file system presents itself as an application on a customer's compute infrastructure. Customers can install as many SSDs as needed while adding capacity later as data grows. Compute resources can be scaled up or down as needed to meet performance requirements.
Workato
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Vijay Tella, CEO
Workato is an enterprise-class platform that enables businesses to integrate cloud and on-premises business applications in a self-service manner. It allows even non-technical users to seamlessly integrate hundreds business applications and automate business processes and tasks, all with no coding.
ZeroStack
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Ajay Gulati, CEO & co-founder
ZeroStack uses smart software and artificial intelligence to deliver a self-driving, fully integrated private cloud platform that acts like public cloud at a fraction of the cost. On premises, ZeroStack's cloud operating system converts bare-metal servers into a reliable, self-healing cloud cluster.