Each year, CRN looks at the hot IT startups making an impact on the channel on our Emerging Vendors list. The list includes startups that were established no earlier than 2007 and know the value of good channel partnerships; a strategy to leverage the channel to go to market is also a requirement. Here we present to you the 25 coolest startups to be included on the Emerging Vendors list for 2013.

Also, check out a breakdown of each company on this year's list by technology expertise:

• Big Data/Business Intelligence Vendors
• Business Applications
• Cloud Vendors
• Data Center Vendors
• Mobility Vendors
• Networking And VoIP
• Security Vendors
• Storage Vendors
• Virtualization Vendors

Cupertino, Calif.
Category: Security

Top Executive: Gaurav Banga, Co-Founder & CEO

Bromium introduced its first product, vSentry, in September 2012, and it's quickly gaining the attention of security experts. The company uses strong hardware-based container technology called micro-virtualization. The Xen-based hypervisor isolates each vulnerable or untrusted user task. The goal is to neutralize attacks and detect advanced persistent threats.

San Francisco
Category: Mobility

Top Executive: Andrew Levy, Co-Founder & CEO

Crittercism developed a mobile application performance management system that gives IT managers a realtime view of application diagnostics data, and information about application crashes for software running on iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 mobile devices, as well as HTML5 and hybrid mobile applications.

Mountain View, Calif.
Category: Cloud

Top Executive: Vineet Jain, Co-Founder & 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.

Santa Clara, Calif.
Category: Networking & VoIP

Top Executive: Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder, President & CEO

Embrane, a rising star in the burgeoning software-defined networking arena, takes the position that too many SDN companies are focused on Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking functions. Embrane's heleos-distributed software platform moves the programmable networking attributes most SDN companies promote into Layer 4 through 7 networking, offering such functions as VPN and load-balancing.

Sunnyvale, Calif.
Category: Storage

Top Executive: Doug Brockett, CEO

Data storage startup Exablox came out of stealth mode in April with the Exablox OneBlox storage appliance, a system that brings enterprise storage capabilities, including deduplication, failover, replication and self-diagnosis, to the SMB market in a package the company said is very attractive to solution providers.

Edison, N.J.
Category: Data Center

Top Executive: Fred Dirla, Founder & CEO

FieldView Solutions offers browser-based data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software that helps IT execs manage data centers more efficiently with a realtime view into information about their facilities’ capacity, energy and space use.

Redwood City, Calif.
Category: Security

Top Executive: Mark Risher, Co-Founder & CEO

Impermium provides antispam technology for social networks. The company's subscription-based web service prevents and mitigates most types of suspicious and abusive transactions, and provides realtime and batch monitoring of web transactions. Among the abuses Impermium's service prevents are password hacking, malware placement, fake follower and friending schemes, account takeovers and bogus registration.

Boston
Category: Mobility

Top Executive: Raj Aggarwal, CEO

Localytics develops what it calls closed-loop application marketing and analytics technology. Businesses use the software to gain data-driven insights into end-user interactions with their mobile apps. They then leverage that knowledge to create automated, personalized and behavioral-targeted actions, maximizing revenue and driving customer loyalty.

San Francisco
Category: Virtualization

Top Executive: Dan Mihai Dumitriu, Co-Founder & CEO

Software-defined networking technology developer Midokura offers MidoNet, a distributed platform that decouples cloud assets from network infrastructures. That virtualizes the network stack, helping businesses reduce cloud management costs and more easily leverage multivendor, physical network appliances in a software-based domain.

Tel Aviv
Category: Cloud

Top Executive: Lev Laderman, Co-Founder & CEO

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."

Palo Alto, Calif.
Category: Security

Top Executive: Phillip Dunkelberger, President & CEO

Nok Nok Labs has developed a unified authentication infrastructure the vendor said could one day replace traditional username and password authentication technology. The software can use a device's fingerprint sensors or webcams, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips or voice biometrics for authentication.

Campbell, Calif.
Category: Cloud

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.

San Jose, Calif.
Category: Virtualization

Top Executive: Poojan Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO

Founded by VMware and Oracle veterans, PernixData offers hypervisor technology designed to virtualize server-side flash memory through its software-defined storage system called the Flash Virtualization Platform. Its latest product ties flash storage and solid state drives in multiple servers into a cluster to create high-performance storage for virtualized environments.

Sunnyvale, Calif.
Category: Networking & VoIP

Top Executive: Awais Nemat, Co-Founder & CEO

SDN startup PlumGrid took the wraps off its Virtual Network Infrastructure platform in June. The new technology is targeted at enterprises and cloud service providers that are building out private or public cloud data centers, helping them quickly create, copy and deploy secure, multitenant virtual networks.

Salt Lake City
Category: Data Center

Top Executive: Marc Chenn, Co-Founder & CEO

SaltStack develops systems and configuration management tools that help enterprise cloud and DevOps IT organizations manage data center infrastructures. The products are based on the Salt open source configuration management software.

Indianapolis
Category: Storage

Top Executive: Jeff Ready, CEO

Scale Computing's HC3 system is an integrated server, storage and virtualization platform designed to help midsize businesses develop private clouds. The product is highly scalable and makes complex IT infrastructure appear as a single server.

San Mateo, Calif.
Category: Security

Top Executive: Nand Mulchandani, Co-Founder & CEO

ScaleXtreme's cloud-based monitoring and systems management products are designed to help IT administrators monitor and manage on-premises and cloud servers. The tools are used to build and control physical, virtual and public cloud servers.

Westborough, Mass.
Category: Data Center

Top Executive: Doron Kempel, CEO

SimpliVity came out of stealth mode last year and released OmniCube, an appliance that integrates virtualization, networking, server and storage management. The OmniCube platform, according to the company, simplifies deployment and management of virtual infrastructure to allow IT administrators to better manage virtual machines.

Point Richmond, Calif.
Category: Big Data/Business Intelligence

Top Executive: Liz Derr, Founder & CEO

Simularity develops a business analytics platform that performs both streaming and historical analysis of big data. The software helps businesses find commonalities among massive unstructured data sets that can make them more competitive. The ability to build more targeted, customized advertisements is one of big data's biggest value propositions.

Cupertino, Calif.
Category: Security

Top Executive: Rajiv Gupta, Founder & CEO

Cloud security software vendor Skyhigh Networks, which came out of stealth mode in February, helps businesses leverage cloud services by addressing the problems that come with the viral, uncontrolled adoption of cloud services by employees, especially from personal mobile devices. The platform lets IT and security administrators identify cloud services running on their networks and receive a detailed risk rating for each service.

Cambridge, Mass.
Category: Big Data/Business Intelligence

Top Executive: Mark Terenzoni, CEO

Sqrrl makes Sqrrl Enterprise, a big data platform for building realtime apps that can analyze structured, semistructured or unstructured data. According to Sqrrl, the platform can scale elastically to tens of petabytes of data and is meant to help businesses uncover "hidden value" in their data through interactive queries.

San Jose, Calif.
Category: Networking & VoIP

Top Executive: Emerick Woods, President & CEO

Talari Networks' WAN virtualization technology aggregates multiple, diverse networks into a virtual WAN, and continuously adapts network traffic based on the availability and realtime quality of the network paths. That ensures application performance isn't hindered by underlying network issues.

Redwood City, Calif.
Category: Networking & VoIP

Top Executive: Sreekanth Ravi, Founder & CEO

Tely Labs has made several moves this year to grow both its channel and its family of telyHD videoconferencing systems. The company launched telyHD Pro, its latest videoconferencing system that offers a slew of new features, including interoperability with standards-based systems like those from Polycom or Cisco, and integration with Blue Jeans Networks' videoconferencing service.

Marlborough, Mass.
Category: Virtualization

Top Executive: Don Bulens, President & CEO

Unidesk provides virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) management software the company said helps businesses reduce costs associated with VDI. It does this by delivering and managing applications and operating systems, sustaining user images and customizations, and optimizing storage all through a single interface.

Boston
Category: Virtualization

Top Executive: Ziv Kedem, Co-Founder & CEO

Zerto was formed in 2010 by a group of storage technologists from EMC and Kashya. The company specializes in disaster recovery for virtualized data centers with its Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) software, a hypervisor-based replication and backup solution; ZVR 3.0 was launched earlier this year.