Ready For Primetime: 10 Hot Emerging Vendors For May 2010

Step right up and get what may very well be your first look at 10 hot new vendors that are exploding onto the scene. This month we profile 10 new vendors that are looking to shake up the industry in various technology segments, from video to cloud computing, from software to hardware. These startups know the importance of the channel and are looking to align with valued partners to get their names and products out.



Take a look and get introduced to 10 vendors that we at Channelweb.com think are ready for prime time.

Avaak

Company: Avaak
Tech Sector: Wireless video
Key Product: The Vue personal video network

The Lowdown: Avaak’s Vue system allows consumers to monitor their homes or businesses via the Internet and access a live video feed through a mobile device. The system features a network of small, battery-powered cameras that can be placed anywhere. Vue wire-free cameras install in one minute with two-sided adhesive. Once a camera is turned on, and it automatically finds the network. Users log-in to a my.VueZone.com account and are on their way.

Avaak was founded by Gioia Messinger and Bar-Giora Goldberg in 2004 after they collaborated on a project to develop an ingestible diagnostic wireless pill camera.

The company has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by strategic investor Qualcomm.

IoSafe

Company Name: IoSafe
Tech Sector: Data Protection Hardware
Key Product: IoSafe Solo SSD



The Lowdown: IoSafe was started in 2005 when its founder and CEO Robb Moore decided to look for a better way to store and protect his collection of digital photos. ’I just had my first child and we started taking lots of photos,’ Moore said. ’I put them in an external hard drive, but there was no real data protection for all those photos.’ Hence, Moore and IoSafe developed a series of disaster proof hard drives that provide local backup and can withstand quite a bit of abuse. For example, the IoSafe Solo solid state drive is fireproof up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes and can be submerged in 10 feet of water for up to 3 days.

Zmanda

Company Name: Zmanda
Tech Sector: Storage
Key Product: Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, Zmanda Cloud Backup



Zmanda develops open source backup and recovery software, and provides resources to open source data protection projects as well as hardware, collaboration tools, and financial assistance to open source developers.



The company’s Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL provides a complete backup and recovery solution, including flexible scheduling, snapshots, and continuous data protection (CDP) for MySQL databases. The company also introduced recently a disaster recovery option for companies with one or hundreds of MySQL databases.



The company also offers Zmanda Cloud Backup, an application which backs up a Windows server and live applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server to the Amazon S3 storage cloud.



Zmanda was founded by CEO Chander Kant and Vice President of Engineering Paddy Sreenivasan in 2005. The company in 2007 raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Helion Venture Partners.

gloStream

Company Name: gloStream
Tech Sector: Software
Key Product: gloEMR



Electronic medical records are a major opportunity for solution providers, and software vendor gloStream is helping VARs with the right skills navigate the esoteric ins-and-outs of the medical industry.



Founded in 2005, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based gloStream has wrapped its flagship gloEMR offering around the Microsoft Office platform because that's what the vast majority of medical practices use, according to CEO Michael Sappington.



Like Microsoft, gloStream also places great importance on VARs, and the company does all of its business through the channel. "Many medical practices are small businesses, and we recognized that the best way to go to market is by courting local partners with Microsoft expertise," says Sappington. "Doctors demand customization, and our partners are best equipped to deliver it."



With $44,000 of stimulus funding earmarked for each and every doctor in the country, gloStream is aggressively recruiting solution provider partners. VARs don't need to be familiar with the medical industry, since gloStream provides certification training that helps partners to consult with doctors and accurately gauge their needs. All that's required is knowledge of Microsoft's server and database products.



"Partners need help when it comes to understanding the medical industry. That's where we come in with our certification courses," says Sappington.

CloudShare

Company Name: CloudShare
Tech Sector: On-Demand Software Infrastructure
Key Product: CloudShare Enterprise



Today when a software developer or solution provider is selling a software product to a prospective customer, the company often has to set up an on-site system that replicates an entire IT environment. CloudShare Enterprise, an on-demand service, enables technology vendors to remotely provide product evaluations, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and training and certification without shipping machines -- and staff.

Solution providers can use CloudShare themselves, as well as reference-sell the service to their customers under CloudShare’s recently launched affiliate program. CloudShare, founded in 2007, also offers CloudShare Pro, a scaled-down version of its product geared toward individual users.

Stage 2 Networks

Company Name: Stage 2 Networks
Tech Sector: VoIP
Key Product: Stage 2 Hosted Business Phone Systems and Enhanced Voice Services



Unlike many competitors trying to shoehorn hosted PBX and VoIP options into their existing portfolios, Stage 2 designed its services offerings under a hosted model right from the start, said Simon Fitzsimmons, director of sales. The six-year-old company specializes in hosted and managed communications for SMBs. Channel partners, particularly Stage 2's channel of nearly 90 agents, play a key role in the company's growth and according to Fitzsimmons enjoy healthy commissions and vertical-market specific education.



"We've morphed into having next-level agent channel managers, to the point where they're another arm of our sales force," he explained. "We're committed to educating our agents to ensure they get right to the heart of what we do on a daily basis, making it much easier for them to generate sales. We're not just throwing product and service ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks. These are very targeted investments."

RainStor Shrinks DataSMQ-8217-SMQs Footprint

Company Name: RainStor
Tech Sector: Storage Software
Key Product: RainStor 3.5 software



Want to get a bead on storage and software vendor RainStor? It’s Data Domain for structured data, according to Ramon Chen, the San Francisco-based company’s vice president of management. Founded in 2004, RainStor took technology developed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense for running complex analytics on data and focused on building a better way to store and query massive amounts of data stored long-term, often by mandate, in areas like phone call retention.



The upshot, Chen said, is that the vendor’s RainStor 3.5 software can compress data down to as little as 1 percent of its original size, while still making the data accessible to queries -- and in some cases even delivering returns on those queries faster than would be possible through a normal database with normal-sized data. RainStor currently has six enterprise-focused solution provider partners and plans to grow that number to 15 by the end of 2010.

InVisage Technologies

Company Name: InVisage Technologies
Tech Sector: Hardware
Key Product: QuantumFilm



Traditional technology resellers may not see the fruits of InVisage Technologies’ recent labors directly, but they may find themselves pitching the value of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup’s QuantumImage light-collecting tech as soon as 2011. That’s the year that InVisage plans to launch full-scale production of its proprietary QuantumFilm, an extremely photosensitive material that is layered onto CMOS wafers used in small cameras such as those in many mobile phones. The upshot -- much better camera performance and image resolution than is currently possible.



Founded in 2006, the company is currently in an advanced round of VC funding and contracting with TSMC to fabricate light-collecting silicon spun with the thin film that InVisage developed specifically to ’revolutionize the way light is captured,’ according to Michael Hepp, director of marketing. The handset market is the first target for InVisage, but future applications for security cameras, the automotive industry and medical applications could bring the company into more direct contact with VARs who work deeply in those verticals, Hepp said.

Eucalyptus Systems

Company Name: Eucalyptus Systems
Tech Sector: Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Key Product: Eucalyptus Enterprise



Eucalyptus Systems started as a U.C. Santa Barbara research project in 2006 and has grown into a full-fledged open-source private cloud software offering. Eucalyptus makes an open-source infrastructure software that gives enterprises and government entities the ability to build their own cloud computing environments, getting the most out of their compute capacity to boost productivity, deploy new apps and protect sensitive data all while cutting costs.



Eucalyptus offers a suite APIs that integrate with Amazon Web Services; solutions that deliver public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Eucalyptus also offers Enterprise Edition, an on-premise solution for VMware vShpere users that adds cloud functionality utilizing VMware virtualization technologies, to carve its name into the cloud landscape.

Akorri Networks

Company Name: Akorri Networks
Tech Sector: Virtualization Software
Key Product: BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software



Akorri Networks is taking virtualization by storm. Just last month, the Littleton, Mass.-based startup raked in $10.1 million in Series E equity financing, pumping up the total venture investment in Akorri about $58.5 million since the company was founded in 2005. The money, CEO Allan Wallack said, will help Akorri continue to build out its channel while focusing on the emerging virtualization and cloud computing markets -- two segments ready to explode.



Akorri makes virtual IT infrastructure management software and is 100 percent channel-focused. In 2009, it launched its PartnerPoint channel program and in just six months grew its channel 120 percent and added more than 30 new partners.



Akorri’s BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software provides analysis across virtualization layers and technology silos for virtual and physical server and storage infrastructures.