Sprouting Up All Over

Tough economic times have always brought out the best innovators in technology, and this year Everything Channel and Sightline Group decided to put the spotlight on the best tech startups out there. After sorting through about 100 applications from new tech firms all over the world, hearing their stories and taking a close look, eight companies were selected for the first-ever Sprout Awards for excellence by tech startups. Here they are:

MyAbui: Despite a plethora of social networking sites, Naperville, Ill.-based MyAbui founder Michael Rhodes saw there was still a need for more. He decided to create a social networking platform that allows users to have four different ways of communicating: sending many messages that can reach anyone; many messages to many people; many messages to one person; and one message to one person. A worker could create a circle for one department, a separate circle for the CEO and other circles for regional offices, for example. MyAbui launched in July and already has thousands of users, Rhodes said.

WhipTail Technologies: The Summit, N.J.-based developer of storage arrays featuring industry-standard components and either NAND Flash or DRAM memory solid-state storage technology is an unusual storage hardware vendor in that it is a spin-off from a traditional solution provider. CEO Ed Rebholz said the company entered the market in 2008 because its parent company, a profitable storage solution provider called TheAdmins, saw from conversations with C-level executives that they are moving heavily into virtualized environments.

StarWind Software: The Burlington, Mass.-based startup was spun out of a Ukrainian company late last year, and took with it software that turns standard Intel-based servers into iSCSI SAN appliances in minutes with no training, said CEO Zorian Rotenberg. StarWind does not sell any hardware, but instead depends on 400 worldwide resellers, including 100 in the U.S., to help customers repurpose existing servers as storage devices.

RioRey: Recent high-profile Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks make this a great time for a startup looking to prove its mettle in the hosting market, which is exactly what Bethesda, Md.- based RioRey is doing. RioRey, which was founded in 2006 and started selling its DDoS security appliances in 2008, is already cash-flow positive and has managed to attract to its team two former HP channel executives: Dan Vertrees as senior vice president of sales and marketing, and Ed Burke as vice president of marketing.

MindTouch: This company threatens that it is launching an "assault on tired enterprise vendors and overhyped social suites with the introduction of the first collaborative intranet suite." That kind of tagline is hard to ignore, but at just four years old, the enterprise collaboration software vendor already has made quite a name for itself. The San Jose, Calif.-based company has roughly 16 million users from thousands of companies. Customers include Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, EMC, the U.S. Army and the United Nations.

Agito Networks: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm's founding team all came from the Cisco Systems wireless networking business unit, and in 2007 launched its first product. The RoamAnywhere Mobility Router has an enterprise fixed mobile convergence (eFMC) platform that lets enterprises extend voice and unified communications to cell phones.

Pranah: The company, based in St. Paul, Minn., officially launched in June, but has deep roots in the storage arena. Founder and CTO Martin Fenner started Marner Micro Technologies back in 1991. Steve Carter, CEO, held high-level positions at Switch Products Group at QLogic; Imation; and spent 24 years at IBM in various positions. In July, Pranah hit the SMB storage market with a channel-only appliance in the under-$50K price class that provides enterprise features.

Purewire: The founders of Atlanta-based Purewire have always had security in their blood. They started the company in 2007 a year after selling their prior company, e-mail security software developer CipherTrust, to Secure Computing, which was then acquired by McAfee. Purewire lets companies port outbound Web traffic through the cloud to protect their users by keeping them away from inappropriate sites and ensuring they send or receive only safe data, said Paul Judge, CTO. The technology is aimed at businesses as small as 100-user companies to the largest, Judge said.