10 Emerging Cloud Vendors You Need To Know About

Cloudy With A Strong Chance Of Growth

Businesses and organizations continue to move more of their IT processes to cloud-based systems. While that's certainly boosting the fortunes of major IT vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, it's also creating opportunities for startups offering technology that help customers migrate to the cloud and manage their cloud-based systems.

The worldwide cloud computing market grew 28 percent to $110 billion in 2015, according to Synergy Research Group. Going forward, 451 Research forecasts that spending for Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service will reach $21.9 billion this year and more than double to $44.2 billion by 2020.

Which startups are positioned to capture a share of that growth? Here's a look at 10 emerging vendors that solution providers might want to consider partnering with.

Apcera

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Derek Collison

Founded: 2012

The Apcera trusted cloud platform is a highly secure, policy-driven, hybrid cloud platform for cloud-native applications, containers, microservices and legacy applications. Apcera enables developers and DevOps teams to use any modern tool or software they want while giving IT and operations teams the assurance that their infrastructure is safe and secure.

AppFormix

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Sumeet Singh

Founded: 2013

AppFormix delivers a cloud service optimization platform that targets enterprise DevOps teams. With real-time analytics, capacity planning and orchestration tooling, AppFormix software gives cloud operators and application developers a shared dashboard to understand performance across the entire cloud stack, for hybrid, private and public enterprise clouds.

Archive360

New York

Top Executive: CEO Robert DeSteno

Founded: 2012

Archive360 provides next-generation email archive migration software solutions. Archive360's flagship software is the Archive2Anywhere Product Suite, a data migration platform that integrates with numerous data sources and target repositories for fast and defensible archive migrations.

BetterCloud

New York

Top Executive: CEO David Politis

Founded: 2011

BetterCloud puts IT in control of the modern workplace through user life-cycle management, data security and automation that is purpose-built for Software-as-a-Service. BetterCloud's products are used by more than 50,000 organizations that manage 32 million users.

Cumulus Networks

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Josh Leslie

Founded: 2010

Cumulus Networks demystifies the complexity of networking and enables better, faster, easier-to-manage networks to build next-generation public and private clouds. Cumulus Networks has received venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Peter Wagner and others.

In March Josh Leslie, who served as vice president of sales since June 2015, took over as the company's CEO. Founder and CEO JR Rivers became the company's chief technology officer.

HotLink

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Lynn LeBlanc

Founded: 2010

HotLink enables today's "always-on" data center with a transformation platform for hybrid cloud automation, orchestration and management. Its patented technology lets the company's 1,500-plus customers easily integrate cloud-based resources into existing operations for streamlined and low-cost disaster recovery, business continuity, cloud migration and a wide range of hybrid cloud use cases.

IndependenceIT

Allentown, Pa.

Top Executive: CEO Seth Bostock

Founded: 2012

IndependenceIT provides a workspace automation software platform that allows IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver desktop environments, workspaces, applications and data from any cloud infrastructure to users anywhere, on any device. The company's Cloud Workspace Suite combines applications, end-user and infrastructure management into an easy-to-manage platform.

Platform9

Sunnyvale, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Sirish Raghuram

Founded: 2013

Platform9's mission is to make private clouds fast, easy and affordable. The Platform9 Managed OpenStack transforms an organization's existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service, on-premise cloud within minutes, enabling them to run their private clouds efficiently, at any scale, while leveraging the latest open-source technologies. The company's software supports KVM, VMware and Docker.

Teridion

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Elad Rave

Founded: 2013

Teridion is redefining dynamic content delivery by bringing high-performance connectivity over the internet between cloud-based content and application providers and their customers. Teridion's Global Cloud Network (GCN), a global routed overlay network leveraging cloud-optimized routing, offers throughput that is, on average, 20 times faster than current Internet speeds.

ZeroStack

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Ajay Gulati

Founded: 2014

ZeroStack is a one-stop shop for IT infrastructure that helps businesses transition to hybrid cloud systems. The ZeroStack Cloud Appliance can be deployed in minutes, either on premise or in a co-located facility, offering private infrastructure regardless of location. ZeroStack is also designed to provide application portability across clouds.