Emerging Vendors 2012: Cloud Computing Vendors

Rising To The Cloud

CRN's annual Emerging Vendors list looks at the tech startups that are making a mark in the channel. The vendors on this list span every discipline and technology facet of the IT industry. Here we examine the vendors that are emerging as legitimate players in the cloud computing game. These vendors and their cloud-based services are flipping the tech industry upside down and significantly changing the storage, security and software industries. With the cloud computing industry growing at an unbelievable pace, the value of partnering with a vendor that understands the channel has never been higher. Check out the cloud vendors on CRN's Emerging Vendors list for 2012.

Actian

Redwood City, Calif.

CEO: Steve Shine

Actian's Cloud Action Platform enables users to create, deliver and manage consumer-style apps from an elastic cloud designed to extend from the infrastructure to the platform. The apps, which Actian refers to as "Action Apps," are designed to automate business transactions triggered by realtime changes in data. The company boasts more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

AnyPresence

Sterling, Va.

CEO: Anirban Chakrabarti

Founded by former executives from SAP and Oracle, venture-funded startup AnyPresence aims to cut the complexity out of mobile platform development. Its enterprise mobile platform lets nontechnical users skip having to write code or install any software and to assemble and deploy HTML5, native iOS and native Android apps. Pre-assembled mobile app templates and data source integration capabilities also help with deployment of mobile projects.

BlazeMeter

Tel Aviv, Israel

CEO: Alon Girmonsky

BlazeMeter launched in February 2011 and came out swinging with its cloud-based service for load and performance testing. And the momentum continued with the company revealing in December 2011 that it raked in $1.2 million in venture funding. BlazeMeter's service is based on the Apache JMeter open-source project. It does load and performance testing for Web applications and determines how apps and systems will perform under certain circumstances.

Boundary

San Francisco

CEO: Gary Read

Started by an Amazon veteran, Boundary launched in early 2011 with the goal of offering realtime cloud environment monitoring. Boundary aims to give DevOps teams the ability to measure and analyze network and application traffic in any cloud infrastructure, whether in public, private or hybrid via what it calls Monitoring-as-a-Service. Boundary enables teams to diagnose network traffic spikes, server-to-server application flow issues and bandwidth usage hotspots. Boundary also just came off a $4 million Series A funding round.

CipherCloud

San Jose, Calif.

CEO: Pravin Kothari

In an attempt to cut the security and compliance barriers to cloud adoption, cloud encryption vendor CipherCloud recently came to market with its CipherCloud for Office 365. The product encrypts email messages, calendar and contact data stored in Microsoft's cloud-based Exchange Online and third-party Hosted Exchange, giving businesses control of their messaging data and preventing unauthorized access to organizations' information. CipherCloud for Office 365 is the latest addition to the CipherCloud Platform, which secures multiple cloud applications including Salesforce, Force.com, Chatter, Gmail and Amazon AWS.

Cloudbees

Woburn, Mass.

CEO: Sacha Labourey

Want Java apps in the cloud? CloudBees' platform promises the ability to build, run and manage Java applications in the cloud, quickly and with ease. CloudBees' Java Platform-as-a-Service is aimed at enterprises and ISVs for coverage of the app life cycle from development to production.

Cloudera

Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Michael Olson

Cloudera, founded in 2008, is perhaps the most established of the young Hadoop-focused companies. The company offers a commercial distribution of the Apache Hadoop software, as well as Cloudera Enterprise, a subscription service that includes support and a portfolio of software called the Cloudera Management Suite. In an example of how Cloudera's technology is finding its way into broad use, Oracle has integrated Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop and Cloudera Manager with the Oracle Big Data Appliance.

Configero

Duluth, Ga.

Director of Technology: Alex Sartogo

Salesforce implementation partner Configero offers a variety of cloud-based applications and services for sales force automation, data migration, systems integration and more. Founded in 2008, Configero delivers solutions leveraging Salesforce.com with APEX, VisualForce, API integrations, custom portals and a host of AppExchange products.

IronStratus

Austin, Texas

CEO: Tom Smith

Software-as-a-Service applications can simplify an IT manager's life by leaving the job of running the application to the service provider. But that doesn't eliminate such chores as access management, security maintenance and ensuring regulatory and IT governance requirements are met. IronStratus, founded in September 2009 under the name Conformity, is developing a line of on-demand applications for managing SaaS and cloud applications. IronStratus initially developed its SaaS application management platform and added applications for governance and compliance management, for identity management and user provisioning, and for administering SaaS subscriptions and license utilization.

Ctera Networks

Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Liran Eshel

Ctera's Cloud Attached Storage solution combines on-premise appliances with cloud services to provide an integrated, all-in-one solution for shared storage, data protection and collaboration. This past spring, the cloud storage provider unveiled mobile Apple iOS and Android apps targeting business users looking for secure access to files and data backups.

DotCloud

San Francisco

CEO: Solomon Hykes

DotCloud won $10 million in funding in March from noted VCs Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures for continued development of its Platform-as-a-Service for cloud application development. The company also announced the addition of Jerry Yang, Yahoo co-founder, and Marc Verstaen, engineering manager at Apple, to its board of directors. "A new breed of application platform tools is emerging," said Yang of the startup. "By combining old technologies and approaches with the flexibility needed in today's landscape, DotCloud will set a new standard for building applications in the cloud."

Embrane

Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Dante Malagrino

Embrane in December 2011 launched heleos, what the company described as "the first distributed software platform for powering on-demand elastic network services such as load balancers, firewalls, virtual private networks and WAN optimization." It's a compelling proposition -- the easier delivery of those types of network services using flexible software instead of cumbersome physical hardware -- and Embrane's target customers are enterprises looking to build out cloud environments.

Evolve IP

Wayne, Pa.

CEO: Thomas Gravina

Cloud services provider Evolve IP offers a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications, infrastructure and security. Through its Evolved Office, Evolved Data Center and Evolved Network services, businesses can better manage the technologies and networks they deliver to end users while securely providing access to Evolve IP's cloud services.

Exoprise

Waltham, Mass.

CEO: Jason Lieblich

Exoprise wants to take the fear out of making the leap to the cloud. With its CloudReady flagship offering, Exoprise looks to determine if a company is, well, cloud ready. CloudReady uses company data to provide detailed insight into a user's readiness, the TCO of existing on-premise applications and evaluation and recommendation of different cloud options. Exoprise was founded in 2009 and says its goal is to deliver the insight and controls needed to make an informed decision about moving to the cloud. With cloud-based assessment, migration and monitoring offerings, Exoprise wants to guide companies of all sizes to the cloud.

FireHost

Dallas

CEO: Chris Drake

FireHost offers a secure cloud hosting platform, which includes its Secure Cloud Server, PCI- and HIPAA-compliant hosting, and load balancing services. The company has received $12 million in venture funding, and in March opened a data center for secure cloud hosting in Phoenix to complement centers in Dallas and London. Its services are focused thus far on the worldwide eCommerce, SaaS, health-care IT and security markets.

Independence IT

Allentown, Pa.

CEO: Charles Buck

Formerly a solution provider, Independence IT is transitioning to an indirect model to deliver its Instant Freedom Desktop and Total Freedom Desktop solutions with storage and backup, e-mail and other cloud features to customers.

Newvem

Israel

CEO: Zev Laderman

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, which was founded in 2010, calls the process "analytics-based cloud management."

OnApp

London

CEO: Ditlev Bredahl

OnApp develops cloud management, content delivery network (CDN) and storage software for service providers and enterprises. OnApp Storage SAN brings scalability, resiliency and efficiency to cloud infrastructure. OnApp Cloud software allows users to build public or private cloud infrastructure. OnApp CDN improves website performance by letting hosts use spare cloud capacity from other hosts to provide local CDN points of presence.

Piston Cloud Computing

San Francisco

CEO: Joshua McKenty

Storming the scene as one of the first companies to leverage the OpenStack cloud in a product offering, Piston Cloud Computing makes the Piston Enterprise OS, a scalable private cloud operating system aimed at ease of use and with advanced security features for highly regulated environments.

Private Cloud Leasing

Bellingham, Wash.

Private Cloud Leasing boasts that it offers a data center on wheels. The company sells and leases self-contained data centers, preconfigured in a complete standardized end-to-end, private-cloud-capable configuration. Private Cloud Leasing creates strategic partnerships to provide everything from simple upgrades to complete infrastructure replacements.

OS33

Brooklyn, N.Y.

CEO: Jacob Kazakevich

OS33 doesn’t restrict itself to the cloud. Instead, it offers an all-out cloud IT delivery automation platform. The company targets MSPs and gives them a single interface to provision servers, publish applications and select from a catalog of preintegrated software.

ScaleXtreme

San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Nand Mulchandani

ScaleXtreme provides cloud-based server automation tools for distributed data centers, in particular a unified automation platform to build and control physical, virtual and public cloud servers. The company's tools offer the ability to build and modify standard server templates for physical and cloud servers, deploy servers on demand and then quickly redeploy them to a cloud, and do ongoing management of servers including realtime management of configuration, inventory and applications. ScaleXtreme also provides one-time or recurring automation tasks.

SecondLook Solutions

East Rockaway, N.Y.

Cloud-based document management systems may not be sexy, but SecondLook Solutions has found its niche specializing in the legal market. SecondLook was founded in 2010. and its document management play is a SaaS offering that delivers digital document services to let clients search, organize and retrieve information in documents from anywhere at any time.

SkyDox

London

CEO: Anthony Foy

SkyDox makes a cloud-enabled file sharing and collaboration platform to rival Google Docs and others in this increasingly competitive space. SkyDox, which was founded in 2009, offers realtime document collaboration via a suite of online, mobile and desktop-based collaboration, storage and file management tools that let users review, comment on, search, store, deliver, manage and collaborate on more than 200 file formats.

StorSimple

Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Ursheet Parikh

StorSimple in April started selling a new series of storage appliances featuring local capacity of up to 100 TB integrated with cloud-based primary, archive, backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The new line from StorSimple ranges in terms of on-premise capacity from 10 TB to 100 TB, after dedupe and compression. One new feature, Cloud Snap, puts data snapshots on the cloud that can be used to quickly recover data even if the application that produced the data is not available. The appliances also let data be recovered to the original customer site or, in a disaster, in a remote site.

SurDoc

Menlo Park, Calif.

CEO: Alex Wang

Startup SurDoc has entered the cloud storage arena with an online document storage and management service. Launched in December 2011 with $4 million in venture funding from IDG Ventures, the company is offering 10 GB of free storage along with free, secure and automatic backup of Microsoft Windows data files to the cloud. SurDoc lets users share documents across mobile and desktops via Web browser or e-mail client.The company also recently unveiled a secure document signing capability feature on its SurDoc platform.

More 2012 Emerging Vendor Coverage

CRN's 2012 Emerging Vendors:
Emerging Vendors 2012: Networking Vendors
Emerging Vendors 2012: Security Vendors
Emerging Vendors 2012: Storage Vendors
The 25 Coolest Emerging Vendors For 2012
2012 Emerging Vendors: The List