8 Startups That Stood Out At Amazon's AWS re:Invent Show

Opportunistic Feeding Frenzy

Amazon Web Services partners of all stripes convened at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week, hawking new products and services that do things that AWS hasn't yet got around to building.

Turns out there are a surprising number of opportunities to complement what AWS offers, and the conference expo floor was a bustling hive of noise and activity, with startups clamoring to grab people's attention.

Here are eight products and services that stood out from the crowd at the event.

CopperEgg Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Cloud vendor CopperEgg, led by CEO Bob Quillin (pictured), added application performance monitoring to its portfolio with a new offering called Real User Monitoring (RUM), which keeps tabs on apps running in the cloud and makes sure they're running efficiently.

RUM, which runs on Amazon Web Services, as well as Rackspace, Windows Azure and other clouds, lets organizations figure out exactly how much cloud capacity they need, which saves money long term.

Key features of RUM include a unified dashboard for servers, websites and apps, real-time analysis and integration with developer tools such as Chef, Puppet and GitHub.

Jaspersoft 5.5

Business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft rolled out version 5.5 of its BI software, which includes revamped reporting and analytics capabilities.

Jaspersoft 5.5 comes with improved data visualization, ready-made reporting templates and improved high-availability features. Another big new addition: Jaspersoft Studio, an Eclipse-based redesigned version of iReport Designer, Jaspersoft's flagship reporting tool.

GenieDB MySQL-as-a-Service

GenieDB unveiled MySQL-as-a-Service, a cloud database offering that's now available on the AWS Marketplace.

Administrators can do everything they need to do through a Web-based management tool, such as setting up backups and performing monitoring and analytics of database performance.

"By simplifying database creation and administration, companies can stay focused on their core businesses, rather than worrying about outages, availability and application response time," GenieDB CEO Cary Breese (pictured) said in a blog post.

Clustrix's Database Analytics Mashup

Database startup Clustrix showed off its ClustrixDB software, which combines a scale-out database with real-time analytics of live operational data. It's a big data play that promises to let customers tap into the value that hides within Web transactions, social media and unstructured data within organizations.

Clustrix says what it offers is better than in-memory databases -- such as SAP HANA and HP Vertica -- because it can do analytics as well as deliver the high level of performance needed for transaction processing. Clustrix's customers include AOL, Rakuten Global Markets and Symantec.

Syncsort Ironcluster

Big data startup Syncsort launched Ironcluster Hadoop ETL, a data integration engine that works with Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service. ETL refers to extract, transform and load, a series of database functions used in data warehousing.

Ironcluster's benefits include "blazing speed, virtually infinite scalability, and ease of use," and it's designed for organizations that want to move off older data warehouses and mainframes, according to Syncsort.

Syncsort CEO Lonne Jaffe (pictured) in a statement described Ironcluster on Amazon EMR as an "extremely simple, inexpensive and secure way for an enterprise to get started with high-performance big data processing in the cloud."

Sumo Logic's Integration With AWS

Cloud startup Sumo Logic, which sells a service that manages and analyzes log data, showed off its new integration with Amazon Web Services CloudTrail. Unveiled last week, AWS CloudTrail logs all API calls through AWS services, showing who made the calls, which resources are being changed and where calls are coming from.

Sumo Logic says the AWS CloudTrail integration will help customers pinpoint patterns of anomalous activity, be it from users or network and configuration changes.

"Companies are in desperate need to not only aggregate all machine data but obtain deep insights from that data in order to identify and fix operational issues and quickly verify compliance with internal security policies," Sumo Logic CEO Vance Loiselle (pictured) said in a statement.

Panzura Cloud Controllers

Storage startup Panzura unveiled Cloud Controllers as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which customers use to create virtual instances of Panzura's cloud storage system running on EC2. Customers have their choice of three AMI appliances.

Panzura's cloud storage platform has received the government's FIPS 140-2 certification, making it an option for federal agencies and contractors looking to move data to the cloud. The startup raised $25 million in a Series D round in June and has raised $58 million to date.

Basho Technologies Riak

Startup Basho Technologies talked about how The Weather Channel, parent company of weather.com and a whole bunch of other websites, is using its Riak NoSQL database. Basho also offers Riak CS, a cloud-based object storage service that runs on top of the Riak database.

The Weather Company is using Riak in multiple AWS availability zones to store satellite, radar and other weather data. "The Weather Company typifies the customer that Riak was designed for," Greg CEO Greg Collins (pictured) said in a statement.