Under the Radar Introduces New Set of Fresh-Idea Companies

These are 32 carefully selected startups that are likely to be serious IT influencers in the months and years to come.

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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 midsized businesses. Its business model has been compared with those of open-source software providers Zimbra and MySQL.

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, 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.

HipChat, Sunnyvale, Calif., is a private group chat and instant-messaging service for companies and teams. It has no ads, obscure screen names, or failed file transfers. Users collaborate in real time with colleagues and clients in persistent chat rooms; chat history and files are saved. Administrators control who joins the secure network and what they can see.

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 solutions from Web application, host, network and database vulnerability assessment tools and centralizes all vulnerability data and reporting functions.

Kinamik Data Integrity, Redwood Shores, Calif., specializes in providing real-time data integrity IT and innovative data-assurance solutions. The company's flagship product, Kinamik Secure Audit Vault, centralizes and preserves sensitive data as it is generated to create irrefutable records and to provide actionable data.

Loggly, San Francisco, provides a LAAS (logging as a service) platform for log management and data analysis. Loggly's cloud-based service enables users to monitor, debug and troubleshoot their IT infrastructure, applications and business processes to generate actionable results. 

NimbusDB, Cambridge, Mass., is a SQL database with 100 percent ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) semantics. Unlike existing SQL databases, NimbusDB delivers the key requirements for cloud-style environments, including dynamically adding or deleting nodes from a live system.  NimbusDB can also move live databases between data centers, allocate unused remote machines to any database and maintain redundant disk-based copies of any database.

Nitobi, Vancouver, B.C., makes PhoneGap, an open-source development tool for building cross-platform mobile applications with HTML5 and JavaScript that takes advantage of core native features in the Apple iOS, Google Android, HP/Palm WebOS, Symbian and BlackBerry SDKs. The PhoneGap open-source framework has been downloaded more than 400,000 times.

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.

OneLogin, Santa Monica, Calif., has a cloud-based identity-management product that provides single sign-on, user provisioning and directory integration. OneLogin is pre-integrated with thousands of applications and allows enterprises to get up and running in minutes. IT can centralize user management, access control and auditing while end-users get secure, one-click access to all their Web applications.

PagerDuty, San Francisco, has an incident tracking and alerting system for IT operations teams. PagerDuty collects alerts from IT monitoring systems and alerts the on-duty engineer if there's a problem. Alerts are dispatched via automated phone call, SMS (Short Message Service) or email.

PHP Fog, Portland, Ore., says it makes cloud deployment, scaling and running of content-management systems and other PHP-based applications "as simple as installing iPhone apps."

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.

Recurly, San Francisco, provides subscription-billing management as an outsourced service. Recurly can be set up in days and fully automates recurring billing, error-handling, dunning management, customer upgrades and downgrades, and all related communications.

RethinkDB, Mountain View, Calif., is redesigning databases to meet big-data management requirements and to take advantage of the latest advances in hardware. It is working to refresh database IT from the low-level intricacies of database internals to high-level data access.

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, 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.

Strobe, San Francisco, provides software and cloud services for touch-centric applications on the Web. Based on a blend of technologies, like native, HTML5 and SproutCore, Strobe applications offer a high-quality native-style user experience across devices. It works offline and has a social-networking interface.

TransLattice, Santa Clara, Calif., is a distributed application and cloud-computing company that delivers elastic 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, 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.

YaM, Alexandria, Va., has a new business-presentation cloud service that enables users to capture and store information on a whiteboard directly in the meeting interface. YaM allows teams to share information in real time and collaborate on specific topics in a visual and structured manner. It supports multiple devices.