Emerging Vendors 2017: Cloud Startups You Need To Know

True Innovation

In a space where shattering the status quo is the status quo, it takes a lot to stand out as a cloud startup in 2017. But with businesses of all sizes continuing to move more and more of their IT processes to cloud-based systems, there is still plenty of room for innovative startups to carve out their niche and make a name for themselves.

Sure, the Amazons and Googles of the world made "the cloud" the mainstream buzzword it is today, but for startups with truly innovative tech, the opportunities around migrating customers and managing their cloud-based systems are endless.

To that end, we've identified 27 cloud startups as part of our 2017 Emerging Vendors list that are driving innovation and reshaping the cloud computing landscape.

Apcera

www.apcera.com

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Derek Collison

Founder and CEO

Apcera offers a container management platform for enterprises that are aiming to modernize their legacy workloads and securely accelerate their efforts around innovation. The platform, which it built for both legacy and cloud-native applications, provides an out-of-the-box solution complete with container workflow, orchestration, scheduling, networking and storage.

Archive360

www.archive360.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Robert DeSteno, Co-Founder and CEO

Focused on data migration and management for Microsoft's Azure cloud, Archive360 offers products including Archive2Azure, an unstructured data storage and management solution for Azure. The product brings benefits around scale (storage is available on-demand); security (with advanced encryption); and return-on-investment (it enables users to retire on-premises technologies).

Cazena

www.cazena.com

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Prat Moghe, Founder and CEO

Cazena automates the movement of data processing to the cloud with its Big Data Platform as a Service, simplifying the process of running analytics workloads on AWS or Azure. The company's platform bundles together cloud databases, analytics engines, data movers, security and other tools.

Dizzion

www.dizzion.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Steve Prather, President and CEO

Focused on serving end users at small and medium-sized businesses, Dizzion offers desktop-as-a-service solutions alongside secure endpoints, application delivery and storage. The company's virtual desktop solutions are aimed at use by remote workers, particular in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.

Dome9 Security

www.dome9.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Zohar Alon, CEO & Co-Founder

Dome9 Security provides security and compliance solutions for enterprises that are using one or more public clouds--including AWS, Azure and Google. The solutions include assessment of security posture, threat protection and detection of misconfigurations, and the company enables greater simplicity along with a more-secure cloud environment.

Elastifile

www.elastifile.com

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Amir Aharoni, CEO and Co-Founder

Focused on enabling hybrid cloud solutions, Elastifile offers technology for unifying data from numerous locations and managing the data as if it was stored locally. Underpinning the product is Elastifile’s distributed file storage technology--the Elastifile Cloud File System--which is a software-defined, flash-native solution.

Hedvig

www.hedviginc.com

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Avinash Lakshman, Founder and CEO

Hedvig is a provider of software-defined, hyper-scale storage offerings, which aim to protect data through replication across multiple private and public clouds. The company's Distributed Storage Platform uses block, file and object storage for multiple environments (bare metal, hypervisor and container), and offers a boost in performance as the solutions scale up.

Hypergrid

www.hypergrid.com

Founded: 2016

Top Executive: Nariman Teymourian, Chairman and CEO

HyperGrid offers public cloud-like services to enterprises that are running on-premises infrastructure. The offering, HyperCloud, brings together infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and applications services. All equipment and software is owned and operated by Hypergrid, and enterprises pay only for the services they use.

Infinite Ops

www.infiniteops.com

Founded: 2015

Top Executive: Michael Fraser, CEO, Founder and Chief Architect

With the aim of making public cloud easier to deploy and manage, Infinite Ops enables users to quickly deploy popular services onto the cloud of their choice. Infinite Ops can bundle IT services and software such as workspaces (Citrix Xenapp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Teradici Cloud Access PCoIP) with databases, firewalls, identity management and more.

itopia

http://www.itopia.com

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Jonathan Lieberman, CEO and Co-Founder

The Miami-based startup is among a new crop of Workspace-as-a-Service vendors looking to bring virtual desktops and other IT services to a larger market. Itopia's software, which works in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform, automates discovery, migration and management. All business goes through the channel.

Netskope

www.netskope.com

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Sanjay Beri, CEO

As a cloud access security broker, Netskope, based in Los Altos, Calif., helps businesses identify Shadow IT, analyze the threats from unsanctioned software, and implement cloud security policies. The agentless solution delivers visibility into enterprise workloads and mitigates potential security and data loss hazards.

Platform9 Systems

https://platform9.com/

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Sirish Raghuram, CEO

This startup founded in Sunnyvale, Calif. by former VMware engineers delivers OpenStack cloud orchestration and Kubernetes container orchestration as turnkey solutions to customers and channel partners. Platform9's management platform looks to enable self-service deployment of private clouds built leveraging those cutting-edge technologies.

Pulseway

www.pulseway.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Marius Mihalec, CEO and Founder

The mobile-first IT solution from MMSOFT Design, based in San Jose, Calif., helps IT administrators and managed services providers remotely monitor and manage cloud infrastructure while also protecting endpoints. Users can connect through an API to any application using a smartphone, tablet or browser.

Purple

www.purple.ai

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Gavin Wheeldon, CEO

This startup based in Manchester, UK, offers a WiFi platform that business can deploy at no charge to track the shopping habits of customers who opt to connect through social network accounts. Data ingested through those public access points in concert with analytics and marketing tools can be used to engage customers.

Reltio

www.reltio.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Manish Sood, CEO

Reltio, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., offers a cloud service that delivers recommendations and insights to customers based on their own corporate data. The platform combines metadata management and NoSQL graph databases to run data-driven applications and large-scale analytical workloads.

Sapho

www.sapho.com

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Fouad ElNaggar, CEO and co-founder

Sapho, based in San Bruno, Calif., helps enterprises drive employee productivity with a platform for building "micro apps" on top of their legacy IT systems. The applications, which can be accessed by employees through a modern portal, are intended to simplify workflows and accessing tasks and data.

Skyhigh Networks

www.skyhignetworks.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Rajiv Gupta

This stand-alone cloud access security broker, based in Campbell, Calif., offers a platform through which companies can gain visibility into their usage of cloud applications while implementing controls, adding data security protections and detecting threats. Skyhigh partners can integrate the solution with a wide variety of third-party security products.

SkyKick

www.skykick.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executives: Evan Richman and Todd Schwartz, Co-CEOs

SkyKick offers a platform engineered specifically for cloud-focused solution providers. The Seattle-based company started by specializing in migrations to Microsoft Office 365, but has since introduced a broader suite of cloud management, migration and backup solutions that can be directly embedded into customer websites and custom-built tools.

Snowflake Computing

www.snowflake.net

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Bob Muglia, CEO

Snowflake Computing develops cloud-based data warehouse technology aimed at safely and efficiently storing, transforming, and analyzing business data to let businesses easily and quickly gain data-driven insight. It offers an SQL-based data warehouse designed for the cloud to support modern applications and data.

Stratoscale

www.stratoscale.com

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Ariel Maislos, CEO & founder

Stratoscale's cloud data center software, Stratoscale Symphony, helps businesses build an application-centric and service-driven AWS Region within their enterprise data center, including compute, object and block storage, networking, an application catalog, identity and access management, and a variety of other services.

The Sixth Flag

www.thesixthflag.com

Founded: 2015

Top Executive: Pete Kofod, CEO & founder

The Sixth Flag provides workspace-as-a-service for global teams and organizations requiring remote desktop management solutions. The Sixth Flag Desktop allows users to access secure corporate virtual desktops from anywhere in the world, whether from a laptop, desktop, or tablet, via an internet browser with no need to download software.

vArmour

www.varmour.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Timothy Eades, CEO

The vArmour DSS Distributed Security System is a distributed platform with integrated security services including software-based segmentation, micro-segmentation, application-aware monitoring, and cyber deception to help organizations protect critical applications and workloads. vArmour partners with companies including AWS, Cisco, HPE and VMware to build security into modern infrastructures.

Velostrata

www.velostrata.com

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO & co-founder

Velostrata provides software for moving production applications to the public cloud in a cost-effective, low-risk fashion. The company's technology decouples compute from storage, making it possible for enterprises to move workloads to and between clouds without re-writing applications, modifying images, degrading application performance. or changing management processes.

Vena Solutions

www.venasolutions.com

Founded: 2011

Top Executive: Don Mal, CEO

Vena Solutions provides budgeting, planning, and revenue forecasting software for medium to large sized organizations that integrates with native Microsoft Excel over the web. Vena offers finance and executive teams an enterprise-class cloud solution that combines Excel with a centralized database, workflow, reporting, and analytics.

Weka.IO

www.weka.io

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Michael Raam, CEO & president

Weka.IO provides web-scale enterprise file storage software. The Weka.IO file system presents itself as an application on a customer's compute infrastructure. Customers can install as many SSDs as needed while adding capacity later as data grows. Compute resources can be scaled up or down as needed to meet performance requirements.

Workato

www.workato.com

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Vijay Tella, CEO

Workato is an enterprise-class platform that enables businesses to integrate cloud and on-premises business applications in a self-service manner. It allows even non-technical users to seamlessly integrate hundreds business applications and automate business processes and tasks, all with no coding.

ZeroStack

www.zerostack.com

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Ajay Gulati, CEO & co-founder

ZeroStack uses smart software and artificial intelligence to deliver a self-driving, fully integrated private cloud platform that acts like public cloud at a fraction of the cost. On premises, ZeroStack's cloud operating system converts bare-metal servers into a reliable, self-healing cloud cluster.