As it does each year, Dealmaker Media's Under the Radar conference, held April 28 in Mountain View, Calif., showcased some promising startup companies. Each of the 32 companies selected gets six minutes on stage (with a PowerPoint, SlideRocket, video or other presentation) to try to impress a group of skeptical venture capitalists looking for companies with good ideas and at least the potential for good execution. This year, some 300 companies competed to get into the final 32. The theme this time was "Consumerization of the Enterprise," reflecting the clear trend toward the use of consumer devices and cloud services in businesses. Most of the companies showed cloud-service related products. Chances are good that if a company is a finalist to present at UTR, it will receive funding of some kind—whether from a venture capital firm or firms, an angel investor or some other source. These are companies—carefully selected by Dealmaker Media founder Debbie Landa and her team—that are likely to be serious IT influencers in the months and years to come. Following are short descriptions of 16 of the most impressive companies selected, in alphabetical order, including their headquarters locations and links to their Websites. There’s no doubt eWEEK will examine many of these in closer detail in the weeks and months to come.
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Abiquo
Abiquo, Redwood City, Calif., has an open-source management platform for private, public and hybrid clouds using a globally deployed computing infrastructure that can be accessed through a single control dashboard. Abiquo says its customers are able to decrease the cost/complexity of managing their virtual IT environments while maintaining control of the physical infrastructure and increasing agility to change hypervisors as needed.
AppDirect
AppDirect, San Francisco, offers companies a free, private business application network to find, buy and manage Web-based applications. It allows businesses to use and manage all their Web-based applications in one secure site. It also offers a marketplace giving businesses direct access to the latest tools.
AppFirst
AppFirst, New York, is a MAAS (mobility as a service)-based, application-aware infrastructure performance management product. It provides application architects and IT managers with visibility into the behavior and performance of applications across an entire application stack—regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers).
CloudPassage
CloudPassage, Menlo Park, Calif., is a security SAAS (software as a service) company offering the industry's first and only server security and compliance product purpose-built for elastic cloud environments. The company addresses the technical challenges of securing highly dynamic cloud-hosting environments where consistent physical location, network control and perimeter security are not guaranteed. The company's early product feature set includes server vulnerability and compliance management, and centralized management of host-based firewalls. CloudPassage operates across infrastructure models and seamlessly handles cloud server bursting, cloning and migration.
Clustrix
Clustrix, San Francisco, says it has built a database with "no limits." It has no limits to database size, table size, the complexity of queries and performance. The Clustrix database offers dynamic online scaling, seamless fault tolerance, full relational and transactional capabilities, and MySQL wire-line compatibility in a single-instance database.
DotCloud
DotCloud, San Francisco, is a second-generation PAAS (platform as a service) technology. It makes it simple for developers to deploy and scale their applications, while delivering the flexibility and robustness required by critical business software. Developers can mix and match from a large choice of languages, databases, caching and messaging components, leaving them in full control of their IT stack.
Erply
Erply, New York, is an enterprise software company focusing on cloud-based retail and point-of-sale IT. The company provides elaborate inventory management, point-of-sale and sales management software that would normally be out of reach for small and midsize businesses. Its business model has been compared with those of open-source software providers Zimbra and MySQL.
GoodData
GoodData, San Francisco, offers a powerful cloud-based business-intelligence platform, which provides users with operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData customers include Enterasys Networks, Pandora Media and Software AG, and its platform is embedded into offerings from cloud innovators such as Zendesk, Aurix and Brightidea.
Hadapt
Hadapt, New Haven, Conn., transforms Yahoo's Hadoop into a cloud-based data-warehousing analytics platform, allowing customers to store and rapidly analyze structured and unstructured data in one infinitely scalable system. Using a hybrid database architecture to combine the high performance of relational DBMSes with the scalability of Hadoop, Hadapt claims to perform SQL queries 50 times faster than Hadoop while running on inexpensive commodity hardware or in a cloud environment.
HoneyApps
HoneyApps, Chicago, consolidates all of an organization's security vulnerability information, reporting and management into a one-stop shop to manage the entire lifecycle of security bugs from detection to close. Its SAAS-based flagship product, Conduit, connects a number of automated vulnerability scanning systems from Web application, host, network and database vulnerability assessment tools and centralizes all vulnerability data and reporting functions.
Nutanix
Nutanix, Santa Clara, Calif., is bringing a Google GFS-like distributed-computing infrastructure to the world of virtualized data centers. Designed in-house for server and desktop virtualization, the system delivers both computing and storage capabilities in a converged architecture. The appliance leverages server-attached SSDs and hard disks, enabling organizations to run virtual machines without requiring a complex/costly SAN (storage area network) or NAS (network-attached storage) infrastructure.
POSE
POSE, Ashkelon/Rishon, Israel, is a cloud-based POS (point of sale) system for small businesses, such as retail, cafes and other services. All that is required is a PC and an Internet connection. Users can manage inventory, clients, receipts and orders from a single interface.
SalesCrunch
SalesCrunch, New York, has a social-selling platform—not unlike Salesforce.com—that it says takes selling from "fuzzy art to repeatable process" by capturing, measuring, training and tracking sales across a company and its customers. The company's presentation and training packages are called CrunchConnect, CrunchTrainer and SalesSchool.
ScaleXtreme
ScaleXtreme, Palo Alto, Calif., is building new systems management products delivered as a cloud service. Built in-house to be simple, scalable and social, ScaleXtreme's product aims to transform the way IT administrators manage their Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments. ScaleXtreme was founded by a team with expertise in enterprise software and systems management, including Bladelogic and VMware.
TransLattice
TransLattice, Santa Clara, Calif., is a distributed application and cloud-computing company that delivers flexible throughput and storage capacity for enterprise applications. The platform reduces the need to overprovision infrastructure and allows organizations to quickly scale to meet changing business requirements.
Versly
Versly, San Francisco, has a new cloud-based collaborative content aggregator that integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Web and mobile devices so groups can stay organized from anywhere, at any time. Versly's team consists of some of the original Java team from Sun Microsystems and former architects at WebLogic, Apache and Zimbra.
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As it does each year, Dealmaker Media's Under the Radar conference, held April 28 in Mountain View, Calif., showcased some promising startup companies. Each of the 32 companies selected gets six minutes on stage (with a PowerPoint, SlideRocket, video or other presentation) to try to impress a group of skeptical venture capitalists looking for companies with good ideas and at least the potential for good execution. This year, some 300 companies competed to get into the final 32. The theme this time was "Consumerization of the Enterprise," reflecting the clear trend toward the use of consumer devices and cloud services in businesses. Most of the companies showed cloud-service related products. Chances are good that if a company is a finalist to present at UTR, it will receive funding of some kind—whether from a venture capital firm or firms, an angel investor or some other source. These are companies—carefully selected by Dealmaker Media founder Debbie Landa and her team—that are likely to be serious IT influencers in the months and years to come. Following are short descriptions of 16 of the most impressive companies selected, in alphabetical order, including their headquarters locations and links to their Websites. There’s no doubt eWEEK will examine many of these in closer detail in the weeks and months to come.