Hopeful High-Tech Disruptors Take On DEMO 08

Inspirational stuff, but somewhat discordant in a venue where little blue-haired ladies patrol muted, meandering surroundings that form a cathedral to the relaxed, the retrenched, the retired. Where the golf magazines vastly outnumber the cutting-edge technology rags on the gift shop newsstand. Even the desert itself seems to sense the contrasting messages, offering up snow-capped peaks to frame the swaying palms that line the Marriott's lagoon.

On the DEMO exhibition floor, where 77 hopeful companies populate their booths, the sweeping beauty of the high desert gives way to the manic intensity of the five-minute pitch to prospective investors, customers and journalists. As is the case at Intel Developer Forum, nobody gets a bigger booth than anybody else -- it's up to your product and your powers of persuasion to get people to pay attention at DEMO.

All the technology presented is notable. The DEMO selectors get a lot of applications and winnow them down to just a relative handful. But a few new products stand out, at least at first blush.

StackSafe, of Vienna, Va., is a startup offering a virtualized Test Center for gauging the business impact of IT change on production networks. The application works across a range of virtualization platforms, including VMware and XenSource, giving IT operations teams the ability to virtually stage and test changes to complex, multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks before touching a single, live production system.

It's a simple idea, really, but one that StackSafe CEO Loren Burnett said he was surprised to find gives his company a "truly greenfield opportunity." Burnett said StackSafe will charge $50,000 for a recurring annual license for Test Center and he hopes to develop a channel of resellers and integrators in the enterprise and government sectors.

"It's a great channel product, easy-to-use, easy-to-buy and it provides immediate ROI for your customers," he said.

Across the way, Alistair Mitchell was showcasing a very different product, but one that similarly promises improved business efficiency. Londoner Mitchell is the founder of Huddle, a platform that takes the fun of online social networking and points it in the direction of actually getting some work done.

On Huddle, users from disparate locales can build or join work spaces -- called "huddles," natch -- for personal or professional projects. Each huddle gets a project calendar, a "filing cabinet" for sharing documents and files, a whiteboard for brainstorming and other useful tools. With its Facebook-style interface, Huddle is billed by Mitchell as the place "where work and play collide."

And the Facebook feel is no coincidence. Huddle already has big U.K. retailers like Boots on board, but its reason for being at DEMO is to launch a full integration with the hugely popular Facebook. Now Huddlers can manage their work spaces via their Facebook profiles, even with colleagues who aren't on Facebook. Mitchell said video conferencing and IM would be added to Huddle in a few months, and the company is also working with salesforce.com to easily migrate CRM data into Huddle work spaces.