Emerging Vendors 2014: Cloud Vendors

Conquering The Cloud

Cloud computing is arguably the single most important trend to hit the IT industry in years. It's not only forcing established vendors to change their game plans, but the cloud revolution has created opportunities for a whole new generation of emerging vendors. While there have been fears cloud computing would disintermediate the channel, many of these startups recognize the value solution providers bring to the table. So check out the hottest startups in the cloud computing segment from the Emerging Vendors list for 2014.

Accelerite

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Nara Rajagopalan

Accelerite develops rCloud, a recovery-as-a-service solution that replicates and recovers the production environments of both physical and virtual machines in less than 15 minutes. With rCloud, entire production environments can be restored simultaneously and single virtual servers recovered in just minutes.

Anturis

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Sergey Nevstruev

Anturis is a SaaS platform for external monitoring of company web services and internal monitoring of IT infrastructure, such as servers and applications. Anturis, which targets SMBs, raised $2 million in financing in September and launched a channel program for software resellers and web hosting providers in April.

BetterCloud

New York

Top Executive: Founder and CEO David Politis

BetterCloud's flagship FlashPanel software is used to manage, enhance and secure Google Apps, and the product is offered to resellers to manage Google Apps for their customers. FlashPanel is used by some 40,000 businesses worldwide. In March, Google named BetterCloud a Premier Technology Partner.

Bitcasa

San Mateo, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Brian Taptich

Bitcasa develops cloud storage services, promising unlimited capacity for users to store and share documents, pictures, music and movies from any device. Taptich, previously vice president of international development at Zynga, joined as CEO in September, and the company raised $11 million in supplemental series A funding in November.

BlazeMeter

New York

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Alon Girmonsky

BlazeMeter offers developers a cloud-based application performance- and load-testing platform, based on the Apache JMeter open-source software, covering the entire application life cycle. In May, the company raised $6.5 million in series A financing. In June, BlazeMeter debuted the FollowMe scriptless performance-testing tools.

CareCloud

Miami

Top Executive: President and CEO Albert Santalo

CareCloud develops cloud-based software and services for the health-care industry, including applications for electronic patient records management, patient billing and insurance claim management, and practice operations management. The company's cloud applications are currently used to maintain records for 6.9 million patients.

CipherCloud

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Pravin Kothari

CipherCloud enables organizations to securely implement public and private cloud applications, such as Salesforce.com, Office 365 and Amazon Web Services, providing encryption and tokenization gateways that address concerns about data privacy, residency, security and compliance. The technology protects sensitive information before it is sent to the cloud.

ClearDATA Networks

Tempe, Ariz.

Top Executive: CEO Darin Brannan

ClearDATA Networks provides cloud computing and information security services for health-care providers, and for software vendors and solution providers in the health-care market. The company's HealthData software suite is used to manage and secure health-care applications and records.

CliQr Technologies

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Gaurav Manglik

CliQr's CloudCenter application migration and life-cycle management technology allows organizations to efficiently move, manage and secure applications from on-premise or cloud environments to any private, hybrid or public cloud. In April, the company struck a deal with IBM to provide access to CloudCenter through the IBM Cloud marketplace.

CloudBees

Woburn, Mass.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Sacha Labourey

CloudBees' Platform-as-a-Service software gives users the means to quickly and easily build, deploy and manage mobile and web applications, enabling what the company calls "continuous cloud delivery." Earlier this month, the company established a public-sector sales channel through solution provider DLT Solutions.

Cloud Cruiser

Campbell, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Dave Zabrowski

Cloud Cruiser provides financial management tools that help cloud-centric businesses keep their cloud computing spending under control. The software is built for businesses and service providers to gain transparency, accountability, chargeback and proactive controls of IT costs across public, private and hybrid clouds.

CloudMultiply

Fremont, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Srivatsan Desikan

Startup CloudMultiply's HybridIT Solution (HITS) provides public and private cloud connectors, internal and external app store connectors, and a management console for managing cloud instances and applications through a single "pane of glass." Organizations can build their cloud system on the OpenStack standard.

CloudPassage

San Francisco

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Carson Sweet

CloudPassage's Halo provides security services in a SaaS model across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, offering cloud firewalls, software vulnerability assessment, configuration security monitoring, server account administration, file integrity monitoring, two-factor authentication, and event logging and alerting.

Cloud Technology Partners

Boston

Top Executive: CEO Chris Greendale

Cloud Technology Partners helps companies plan, design and build cloud solutions for applications and infrastructures that reduce IT costs, streamline operations and accelerate time to market. The company offers a comprehensive cloud service portfolio and targeted methodologies and tools. In March, the company launched PaaSLane 2.0 for analyzing Java and .NET source code.

CloudVelox

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Rajeev Chawla

Formerly Cloud Velocity, CloudVelox develops cloud continuity management and hybrid cloud disaster recovery and migration technology. The company’s One Hybrid Cloud secures cloud systems such as AWS and makes them a seamless extension of customer data centers, allowing them to significantly reduce disaster recovery and cloud migration costs.

Cloudyn

Tel Aviv, Israel

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Sharon Wagner

Cloudyn provides cloud-based monitoring and cost optimization software for cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service deployments. The company’s tools provide insights into usage trends and cost-allocation coupled with custom actionable recommendations to enhance performance and reduce spending. The tools support Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and OpenStack.

ConnectSense

Naperville, Ill.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Mike Justice

ConnectSense develops cloud-connected, Wi-Fi-based sensors for monitoring homes and businesses, making the company a potential leader in the Internet-of-Things arena. The sensors are connected through the ConnectSense cloud, an application for creating rules that provide data notifications through email, text messages, Twitter and phone.

CumuLogic

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Mike Soby

CumulLogic develops on-premise, Database-as-a-Service software that businesses and cloud service providers use to deploy database functionality on any infrastructure, including cloud environments, VM pools and bare metal. In May, the company unveiled a MongoDB edition of its CumuLogic DBaaS Platform software.

Custora

New York

Top Executive: CEO Corey Pierson

Custora offers on-demand e-marketing and predictive analysis applications that businesses use to identify customers and keep them engaged. The applications help improve customer retention by analyzing transaction patterns to figure out how customers behave and predict their future buying behavior.

dinCloud

Los Angeles

Top Executive: CEO Bob Din

DinCloud helps organizations rapidly migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud, offering subscription-based provisioning services for migrating desktops, servers, storage, networking and applications to a Virtual Private Data Center. DinCloud struck a deal in June to make its services available to solution providers through Tech Data.

Docker

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Ben Golub

Putting a new spin on the OS wrapper is Docker, formerly dotCloud, which develops an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient Linux container that runs virtually anywhere, including on any server, OpenStack cluster, VM or even bare metal.

ElasticHosts

London

Top Executive: CEO Richard Davies

ElasticHosts is a global cloud service provider that offers easy-to-use cloud servers with instant, flexible computing capacity. ElasticHosts' Elastic Containers cloud servers, based on the company's auto-scaling technology, expand and contract to meet customer demand and are billed purely on consumption rather than capacity.

etherFAX

Marlboro, N.J.

Top Executive: CEO Paul Banco

EtherFAX leverages the cloud to manage business-critical fax communications by extending existing fax server systems and fax-enabled applications to the Internet. The company's cloud service eliminates the need for costly network infrastructure, such as fax boards and media gateways, and uses secure, military-grade encryption.

Eucalyptus Systems

Goleta, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Marten Mickos

Eucalyptus offers open-source software for building private clouds that are compatible with Amazon Web Services APIs and bills itself as the "de facto private cloud reference implementation for AWS." The payback: Some Eucalyptus users have "cut cloud spending by as much as 50 percent and reduced data center spend by two-thirds."

Exoprise Systems

Waltham, Mass.

Top Executive: Founder Jason Lieblich

Exoprise helps IT teams with technology that enables effective adoption and management of mission-critical, cloud-based applications and services, such as Microsoft Office 365, with its CloudReady monitoring and enablement offerings. Its CloudReady Monitor, for example, provides realtime performance visibility from behind the firewall.

HotLink

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Lynn LeBlanc

HotLink develops virtualization management technology, such as its SuperVisor product that lets VMware vCenter natively support hypervisors from Microsoft, Red Hat and Citrix. In February, HotLink added software-defined networking to HotLink DR Express, its VMware vCenter plug-in for Amazon Web Services data protection.

iasset.com

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Scott Frew

Iasset.com provides end-to-end SaaS applications that help companies cost-effectively manage their partner relationships and product life cycles. The company's software integrates all aspects of the channel partner or supply chain business onto one platform.

MeghaWare

Boca Raton, Fla.

Top Executive: CEO Shawn Nagar

Under the names CloudOptix and 21st Century Cloud Computing, MeghaWare develops cloud virtualization software that provides users with a personal cloud application suite and cloud software for creating private cloud storage and caching appliances.

Message Bus

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Paul Midgen

Message Bus develops cloud-based email infrastructure technology that provides messaging capabilities for marketing messages across email and mobile channels. The company launched its next-generation email platform in May and raised $4 million in venture financing that month, bringing its total to $18 million.

Metacloud

Pasadena, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Sean Lynch

Metacloud offers both on-premise and hosted private cloud services, giving customers the benefit of both public and private cloud through its OpenStack-based offerings. In May, the company raised $15 million in Series B financing.

Nebula

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Gordon Stitt

Nebula's OpenStack-based hardware appliance leverages an open-source architecture that Nebula says makes it the "least locked-in hardware company in history." The appliance is meant to streamline the deployment and management of private clouds, and to help businesses better handle the influx of big data, web and mobile applications.

NephoScale

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Bruce Templeton

This IaaS player offers hosted cloud infrastructure, licensed cloud platform software and cloud storage services, leveraging its CloudScript interface that gives users the ability to manage all facets of the cloud. In early July, the company launched its Iaas SSD/10Gbps Hybrid Compute cloud service.

OnApp

London

Top Executive: CEO Ditlev Bredahl

OnApp offers a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform for cloud hosting companies, telcos and MSPs, with a single fully automated control panel for cloud services, dedicated servers, content delivery networks, storage and others. More than 800 service providers in 87 countries run on OnApp.

OS33

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and President Jacob Kazakevich

OS33 offers an all-out cloud IT delivery automation platform. The company targets MSPs and gives them a single cloud desktop interface that unifies applications and data from anywhere, including Windows and web-based applications.

Oxygen Cloud

Redwood City, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Peter Chang

Oxygen Cloud’s technology connects users, devices, storage and identity into an enterprise cloud. Unlike consumer clouds, Oxygen's services provide data management capabilities across company-issued and personal devices, and private and public storage, manageable by enterprise identity and policy controls.

Panzura

Campbell, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Randy Chou

Panzura markets a cloud-integrated storage platform, including its Panzura CloudFS File System that enables customers to take advantage of public cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services and Google. Earlier this month, the company began offering a free cloud gateway virtual appliance.

Piston Cloud Computing

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Jim Morrisroe

Deploying and managing OpenStack clouds can be a chore. Piston Cloud offers a suite of products that use advanced systems intelligence to orchestrate private cloud environments on nothing but commodity hardware. With Piston Cloud's Piston OpenStack 3.0, a single system administrator can operate an OpenStack-powered private cloud.

ProfitBricks

Cambridge, Mass.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Achim Weiss

ProfitBricks says it does cloud infrastructure better and faster than the big boys. The startup hosts an IaaS service built on InfiniBand, a supercomputing technology that provides speedy networking connections between virtual machines. ProfitBricks also offers a "scale-up" approach that lets customers choose the amount of CPU cores, RAM and storage they need.

Quorum

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Edward Sharp

Quorum provides instant "one-click" backup, recovery and continuity, including a series of appliances and DRaaS/hybrid cloud products for SMBs. Sharp, previously NetApp's emerging products vice president, was named CEO in May. In March, the company appointed Nader Soudah as vice president of Americas channel sales.

RapidScale

Irvine, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Randy Jeter

RapidScale offers a range of cloud computing products, including the CloudOffice desktop virtualization platform, CloudDesktop Desktop-as-a-Service and CloudServer Infrastructure-as-a-Service, as well as recovery and mail services. Telco service providers, VARs, MSPs and master agents carry the company's products.

Ravello Systems

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and President Benny Schnaider

Founded by the team that delivered the breakthrough KVM hypervisor for Linux, Ravello has brought to market what it calls the world's first Cloud Application Hypervisor. The payback: two times better performance on Amazon Web Services with virtual machine consolidation.

SaaSMax

San Diego

Top Executive: CEO Dina Moskowitz

In mid-2013, the SaasMax Marketplace platform went from beta to commercial launch. The online marketplace electronically facilitates the reselling and purchasing of Software-as-a-Service business applications through value-added resellers, solution providers, trusted advisers and other reseller channels.

Shift

Los Angeles

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO James Borow

Shift develops marketing software for social media advertisers. Its Open Marketing Cloud application helps with planning, optimizing and analyzing social media advertising campaigns. In June, the company was named a Twitter mobile app promotion partner.

Skydera

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Lecole Cole

Skydera offers its Skydera C3 Platform-as-a-Service cloud command and control system that complements public and private cloud infrastructure services and vendors. The vendor's Skydera Cloud Intelligence application provides cost optimization and chargeback for cloud services.

SkyKick

Seattle

Top Executive: Co-CEOs Evan Richman and Todd Schwartz

The SkyKick migration suites help solution providers automate Office 365 migration projects, including implementation and migration from legacy systems. SkyKick struck a deal with distributor Synnex in July 2013 to make the toolset available to its solution provider customers.

Sokrati

San Francisco

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Ashish Mehta

Sokrati develops a range of cloud advertising and analysis applications for use across paid online media channels.

Spanning Cloud Apps

Austin, Texas

Top Executive: President and CEO Jeff Erramouspe

Spanning develops "cloud-to-cloud" backup and recovery software for cloud applications, including Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

SurDoc

Milpitas, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Alex Wang

SurDoc offers easy-to-use document management and viewing applications for Android and iOS devices, support Office, PDF and other file formats.

The Currency Cloud

London

Top Executive: CEO Mike Laven

The Currency Cloud develops business-to-business applications that automate financial payment processes, including pricing and beneficiary management, execution, receipt, settlement and reporting.

Unitas Global

Los Angeles

Top Executive: CEO Grant Kirkwood

Unitas Global offers enterprise private cloud and IT outsourcing services. Founded in 2009, the company has an active channel partner program that generated 65 percent of the company's new business in 2012.

VirtualQube

Woodinville, Wash.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Scott Gorcester

VirtualQube is a cloud services provider with expertise in solutions based on Microsoft, Citrix and other vendors' technologies. The company sells its cloud platform through channel partners.

Virtustream

Bethesda, Md.

Top Executive: CEO Rodney Rogers

Virtustream is a cloud provisioning and Infrastructure-as-a-Service company that develops the xStream cloud management system. The company recently began offering a fully virtualized SAP HANA managed service for production SAP environments.