The 20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors Of The 2018 Cloud 100
20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors Of 2018
It’s hard to believe that not so long ago businesses were hesitant to rely on the cloud to run their operational applications.
Today cloud computing is the de facto model for businesses to provide their employees with applications for CRM and marketing, business analytics, financial management and accounting, content management and more. The result is that nearly all established software vendors now offer cloud versions of their applications and just about every startup develops its applications for the cloud.
Here are 20 cloud software vendors, from startups to more established companies, whose cloud software has caught our attention.
ClassLink
Berj Akian, Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Clifton, N.J.
ClassLink is a developer of cloud-based education software that connects K-12 teachers and students with each other, their classroom and their curriculum. The software provides single sign-on from devices and desktops to web and Windows applications and access to files on school networks and cloud storage.
Cloudera
Tom Reilly, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Cloudera provides big data management, machine learning and analytics software that’s optimized for the cloud. The vendor has also been extending its technology portfolio to include cybersecurity. In 2017 the company debuted Cloudera Altus, a Platform-as-a-Service system for running large-scale data processing applications on public clouds. It also released a beta version of its upcoming Altus Analytic DB cloud-based data warehouse.
Cloudify
Zeev Bikowsky, CEO
Headquarters: New York and San Jose, Calif.
Cloudify offers an open-source cloud orchestration platform for managing and automating application life cycles and for designing, building and delivering core business applications and network services in the cloud. The 4.0 edition of the Cloudify software, released in April 2017, fundamentally elevated the product from a DevOps tool into a complete application and network management system. A number of telecommunications and network service providers are using Cloudify for their network function virtualization initiatives.
Cloudinary
Itai Lahan, CEO
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Cloudinary describes its mission as freeing companies from the headaches of building complicated, expensive and time-consuming in-house image management systems. The company develops a comprehensive Software-as-a-Service image and video management system for web and mobile application developers.
Confluent
Jay Kreps, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.,
Confluent develops commercial software and services around Kafka, an open-source, stream-processing platform for processing and analyzing streams of data in real time. Confluent’s software helps businesses maximize the value of live data in such industries as retail, financial services, manufacturing, media and logistics management. In 2017 Confluent debuted KSQL, an open-source streaming SQL engine that enables continuous, interactive queries on Kafka, allowing developers familiar with SQL to build applications that work with Kafka. The company also began offering a cloud version of its software in November. Confluent was founded in 2014 by some of some of the engineers who originally developed Kafka.
Data Dog
Olivier Pomel, CEO
Headquarters: New York
As businesses move more of their IT operations to the cloud and develop hybrid on-premises/cloud networks, monitoring the performance of those systems becomes a challenge. Datadog offers a monitoring service for hybrid cloud applications, providing visibility into the performance of those systems and helping IT managers improve system agility and efficiency. Along with improving system uptime, Datadog’s analytics platform can be a key component of a business’ DevOps and digital transformation initiatives.
DataRobot
Jeremy Achin, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Data scientists, the people with the skills needed to derive value from big data, are in big demand these days—and in short supply. DataRobot develops an automated machine-learning platform that captures the knowledge, experience and best practices of data scientists and uses that information to build and deploy predictive models much more quickly than previously possible. With those models, analysts can uncover hidden opportunities and predict outcomes from huge volumes of data. DataRobot, founded in 2012, snagged $54 million in Series C financing in March, bringing its total funding to more than $124 million, and has aggressively invested in its global partner ecosystem. In September the company hired Alteryx executive Seann Gardiner as its executive vice president of business development.
Domo
Josh James, CEO
Headquarters: American Fork, Utah
Startup Domo has attracted a lot of attention with its cloud-based data management, analytics and collaboration system that's designed to help decision-makers identify and act on strategic opportunities. Domo’s software provides a complete system for data acquisition and transformation, data analytics and visualization, collaboration, mobile access, and security and administration, as well as tools for building custom apps. The system can be tailored for specific jobs, such as a CEO, sales or operations executive, and for specific industries such as financial services and health care. One reason for the bright spotlight on Domo is the fact the company has raised nearly $690 million in venture funding from Blackrock, TPG Growth, Institutional Investment Partners and other investors.
Fluree
Flip Filipowski, CEO
Headquarters: Winston-Salem, N.C.
Blockchain technology, originally developed for managing digital currencies like Bitcoin, is essentially a digital ledger that allows information to be distributed but not copied. It has been getting a lot of attention this year as businesses discover blockchain’s potential use for a range of applications that require ensuring the integrity and security of transactional data. Startup Fluree developed FlureeDB, a scalable blockchain cloud database that makes it easier for companies and developers to integrate blockchain technology into their existing IT infrastructure and business applications. FlureeDB, launched as a public beta in November, is seen as a key enabler as businesses increasingly run on decentralized applications. Fluree is the brainchild of Platinum Software founder CEO Flip Filipowski and SilkRoad Technology founder and CEO Brian Platz.
Fuze
Colin Doherty, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Fuze is a fast-growing company in the Unified Communications-as-a-Service market that has garnered attention for its broad portfolio of communications and collaboration products for mid-size and enterprise customers including video, audio and web conferencing; persistent group chat and team collaboration; contact center and analytics; instant messaging; and mobility. In the first half of 2017 the company reported 66 percent year-over growth in new users globally and a 51 percent increase in subscription revenue. Fuze also caught people’s attention when it raised $134 million in venture capital last year.
IT Glue
Chris Day, CEO
Headquarters: Vancouver
IT Glue develops a documentation platform that businesses and managed service providers use to store and organize IT information, helping to increase the efficiency of their technicians and improve both user satisfaction and profit margins. The rapidly growing IT Glue has become especially popular among MSPs, who use the software to manage their customers’ IT, everything from device tracking to password management.
LogicMonitor
Kevin McGibben, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
LogicMonitor provides a SaaS-based performance monitoring system for on-premises and cloud IT systems -- everything from data center servers and network hardware to cloud applications running on AWS and Microsoft Azure. While in-house IT management is a key market for LogicMonitor, managed service providers are a growing part of the company’s customer base. In August the company launched a performance monitoring platform for the service provider market.
Matillion
Matthew Scullion, CEO
Headquarters: Knutsford, Cheshire, U.K.
Matillion develops data ETL (extract, transform and load) software specifically for Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake Computing cloud data warehouse systems. The cloud-native data integration technology works with structured and semi-structured data, transforming big data into business insight. Working in conjunction with cloud data warehouse services, Matillion provides an alternative to complex, expensive on-premises data warehouse systems.
New Relic
Lew Cirne, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
New Relic is a leading developer of a cloud-based application performance management platform that provides IT operations managers, developers and executives with information they need to improve the performance of their complete software stack. The company also offers software for monitoring IT infrastructure, mobile software and browser-based apps, and for analyzing the business impact of software performance.
Nimble CRM
Jon Ferrara, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Monica, Calif.
Nimble CRM combines the strengths of traditional CRM applications, contact management software and social media -- integrated with Google G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 -- to create a comprehensive selling solution. The software delivers a consolidated and detailed view of customers seeded with relevant data from social platforms like LinkedIn, CRM systems like Salesforce and Dynamics CRM, as well as inboxes, calendars, and previous contact records.
Plot.ly
Alex Johnson, Founder
Headquarters: Montreal
Plotly has developed a number of open-source tools for composing, editing and sharing interactive data analysis and visualization charts, graphs and dashboards via the Internet.
The company, also known by its URL ’Plot.ly,’ is catching on among data scientists and developers who develop analytical applications using the Python and R programming languages. Founded in 2013, Plotly could become a significant competitor to leading data visualization tools such as Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft’s PowerBI.
Reltio
Manish Sood, CEO
Headquarters: Redwood Shores, Calif.
The Reltio Cloud service combines master data management, analytics and data-driven applications to deliver insight and recommended actions in such areas as customer engagement, key account management, supplier management and compliance. The Platform-as-a-Service system uses a graph NoSQL database, which supports huge datasets, and leverages multiple cloud systems including AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
Snowflake Computing
Bob Muglia, CEO
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
Snowflake Computing offers a cloud-based SQL data warehouse that competes with traditional on-premises data warehouse systems and cloud data warehouse offerings from AWS and Google. The company says its service provides the performance and concurrency needed to store and analyze huge volumes of data while leveraging the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.
Splunk
Doug Merritt, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Splunk develops operational intelligence software that collects machine-generated data and applies analytics and machine-learning technology to help companies optimize their IT, security and business performance. While Splunk’s software has been most widely adopted for IT operations and security tasks, the Splunk platform is also finding its way into IoT networks for collecting, managing and analyzing reams of IoT data from sensors and devices.
Turbonomic
Benjamin Nye, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Turbonomic's workload automation software for hybrid clouds offers a way to manage applications and workloads, identify performance issues, optimize IT infrastructure utilization and help businesses set and meet quality-of-service levels. In October Turbonomic struck a deal with systems integrator DXC Technology under which DXC will use Turbonomic as the standard automation platform across DXC’s services and hybrid cloud offerings. The contract is Turbonomic’s largest ever and has the potential to quadruple its installed base.