23 Storage, Communications Companies Piquing Investor Interest

Everything You Need To Know, In Under 2 Minutes

At the Intel Capital Global Summit, held last week in Huntington Beach, Calif., Intel Capital discussed its investment strategy while providing over 100 of the companies in its investment portfolio, ranging from startups to well-established global players, the chance to pitch for new investors, customers and partners.

Each vendor got a grand total of 1 minute and 45 seconds to present the company's products, missions, goals and anything else to grab the attention of the audience.

In Part 1 of the Intel Capital Global Summit elevator pitch review, CRN introduced 12 Intel Capital-backed vendors in the software and services business.

Turn the page to catch the elevator pitches of 23 companies in the storage and communications business.

Active Storage: Thinking Big, As In Big Data

Active Storage, a Torrance, Calif.-based developer of high-performance storage systems, is actively developing big data technology targeting what CEO Alex Grossman said would be a $15 billion market by the year 2015.

Active Storage is using its own software intellectual property and a knowledge of the content development process based on its experience working with media and creative professionals to solve the problems related to managing petabytes of data, Grossman said.

Amplidata: Object Storage For Big Data

Amplidata, which develops object storage systems for managing big data, wants to provide customers the opportunity to access hundreds of petabytes of data at half the cost of RAID-based storage, said Mike Wall, CEO of the Lochristi, Belgium-based company.

The AmpliStor Object Storage system is built on a scale-out commodity-based platform. Its BitSpread erasure coding software, similar to the erasure code used by companies like Amazon and Google, provides failure-tolerant storage, Wall said.

Amplidata is looking to license its technology to companies that want to compete with cloud providers, he said.

Crossbeam: Reducing Complexity

Boxborough, Mass.-based network security appliance developer Crossbeam works with customers to reduce the complexity of large data center and telecom networks, said President and CEO Mike Ruffolo.

The company's technology consolidates multiple security appliances into a single virtualized platform running software from any security vendor, reducing the number of boxes customers need to purchase by up to 100-to-1 and reducing the related power and cooling costs of telecom, mobile, financial or enterprise data centers by up to 50 percent, Ruffolo said.

Cymphonix: Prioritizing Network Traffic

Cymphonix, a Salt Lake City-based developer of Internet management solutions, is developing technology that lets businesses prioritize the traffic across their networks, said CEO Joe Lowry.

The company's Cymphonix Composer series of appliances provide the capability to report on, speed up, slow down or cut out any user or group of users or content on a network, Lowry said.

Cymphonix is currently looking for partners with hosted solutions that could work with the company's technology, he said.

Elasticbox: Managing Apps Across Multiple Clouds

Elasticbox, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup developer of technology for deploying applications across multiple cloud providers, simplifies and normalizes the way customers deploy and manage applications inside heterogeneous cloud, said CEO Ravi Srivatsav.

Elasticbox provides tools to control the cost of going to the cloud, as well as tools to manage and deploy cloud apps, all while ensuring customers' compliance requirements, Srivatsav said. Those tools provide flexibility in terms of the framework, and the specific version of the framework, used to develop the apps, he said.

GigaSpaces: Speeding Up Enterprise Applications

GigaSpaces is developing in-memory technology to speed up enterprise applications, said Amnon Raviv, head of Americas ISV and OEM sales for the New York-based company.

GigaSpaces takes advantage of scaling, real-time analytics, big data and high-availability technologies to increase enterprise application performance while helping protect those applications from failures, Raviv said.

InMage: Data Protection And Disaster Recovery

San Jose, Calif.-based InMage develops software that provides data protection and remote disaster recovery in physical and virtualized environments, with full-featured failover and failback capabilities and support for heterogeneous storage platforms, said CEO Kumar Malavalli.

InMage also provides SmartCloud, a platform that MSPs or cloud providers can use to develop disaster recovery as a service, Malavalli said.

Microland: Infrastructure Services Worldwide

Microland, a Bangalore, India-based specialist IT infrastructure services provider, provides 24/7/365 services to customers around the world, said Bala Palamadai, executive vice president of global sales.

Those services include remote infrastructure management services and holistic infrastructure services, Palamadai said.

Netronome: Manageable Data Flows

Fabless semiconductor company Netronome develops solutions that turn oceans of packet data into manageable flows of data, said Howard Bubb, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

The company is working with and looking to partner with customers in the networking, security and software-defined networking (SDN) markets, Bubb said.

Nirvanix: Enterprise Cloud Storage

Nirvanix, a San Diego-based provider of enterprise cloud storage technology offers technology that help customers build public, private and hybrid cloud storage services, said Scott Genereux, president and CEO.

Genereux said that while data is growing at a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 50 percent, that data doesn't generate useful information until it is needed. However, he said, it is hard for most businesses to invest quickly enough in their own storage infrastructures to take advantage of that data, which is where storage clouds become important.

OneBe: Remote Data Wipe

Tokyo-based OneBe is the developer of the TrustDelete software for remotely deleting sensitive data and personal information stored on mobile devices. Seiji Itai, vice president and co-founder of OneBe, said TrustDelete allows customers who lose a portable device to remotely delete the device's data before it is accessed by unauthorized people.

OneBe is currently developing TrustDelete for Ultrabook mobile PCs, Itai said.