The 20 Coolest Cloud Software Companies Of The 2026 Cloud 100
Here’s a look at 20 innovative companies that are driving the evolution of cloud software across enterprise applications, AI, business process management, and data management and analytics.
The Coolest Cloud Software Companies
Global spending for cloud computing software continues to surge, fueled by AI adoption and digital transformation initiatives, with Software-as-a-Service revenue nearing $300 billion in 2025, according to research firm Gartner.
Cloud computing has evolved in recent years from a way for businesses to expand the capacity and functionality of their IT operations to become the core component of those operations.
And that means developers of cloud software, from ERP and CRM applications, to big data platforms and analytics tools, to AI and workflow management software, are playing an increasingly important role in the channel.
As part of CRN’s 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Companies of 2026, here’s a look at 20 innovative software companies that are driving the evolution of cloud software today.
Boomi
Steve Lucas
Chairman, CEO
Under the moniker “Connect everything to achieve anything,” Boomi touts its Boomi Enterprise Platform as an uber iPaaS that integrates and manages applications, APIs, data and AI agents; streamlines business processes; and serves as a hub for AI-driven automation.
Over the last year-plus Boomi has boosted its data management capabilities (through the December 2025 acquisition of Rivery), developed a comprehensive API management offering, launched a data hub command center (powered by ServiceNow) and debuted AgentStudio for managing AI agent life cycles.
Cloudera
Charles Sansbury
CEO
Cloudera, which positions itself as “the hybrid data company,” develops a data and AI platform that it touts as the answer to complex data architectures, siloed data and inconsistent data governance that hinders AI initiatives.
In 2025, through acquisitions and internal development, the company bolstered its flagship Cloudera Platform with new capabilities including Lakehouse Optimizer, Iceberg REST Catalog, Cloudera Shared Data Experience and Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage—all with the goal of improving unified data access and governance.
During the year Cloudera established strategic alliances with ServiceNow and Dell Technologies, the latter combining Cloudera software with Dell’s ObjectScale storage system to create the Cloudera Private AI platform.
Cribl
Clint Sharp
Co-Founder, CEO
Cribl promotes its data observability platform as “the data engine for IT and security” with its ability to collect, process, analyze and route telemetry data from any source to any destination for a broad range of tasks.
Cribl’s technology is particularly timely with the rapid proliferation of AI agents, which are big producers and consumers of telemetry data.
In February the company launched Cribl Lakehouse for storing, managing and analyzing massive volumes of telemetry data. That was followed up in August with Cribl Guard, a new system for proactively detecting and protecting sensitive data.
Databricks
Ali Ghodsi
Co-Founder, CEO
Databricks has become one of the IT industry’s heavy hitters with its Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for a broad range of data and AI tasks.
Throughout 2025 Databricks expanded the scope and functionality of its platform with new capabilities including tools for building data pipelines and developing production-scale AI agents, the new Lakebase OLTP database, and the Data Intelligence for Cybersecurity for collecting and analyzing security system data.
Databricks remains privately held and when it plans to go public is a major guessing game within the IT industry. In September the company closed a $1 billion Series K funding round that put the company’s valuation at more than $100 billion.
Dataiku
Florian Douetteau
Co-Founder, CEO
Dataiku, a longtime leader in the data science space, offers its Universal AI Platform for building, deploying and scaling AI systems. The platform’s key capabilities span generative AI and agents, data preparation and analytics, machine learning and AI engineering operations, and AI governance.
Dataiku, which broke the $350 million annual recurring revenue threshold in October, that same month introduced the Dataiku AI Factory Accelerator that integrates the company’s platform with Nvidia hardware to help move AI systems into production. Also in October the company debuted the Agent Hub centralized workspace for building, sharing and scaling AI agents.
Dbt Labs
Tristan Handy
Founder, CEO
With surging demand for AI-ready data, dbt Labs emerged in recent years as a leading player in the data infrastructure space with its data transformation, testing and documentation platform. In May the company debuted a new engine, dbt Fusion, that dramatically boosted the platform’s performance and scalability.
In October dbt Labs unveiled a deal to merge with Fivetran, a leading provider of automated data movement and connectivity software. Once that merger is completed, slated for later this year, the newly combined companies—a name for the new entity has not been determined—will be a powerhouse in the open data infrastructure industry.
Domo
Josh James
CEO
Domo’s cloud-based business intelligence platform connects to a range of data sources, including operational systems like Salesforce and SAP, analyzes the information and provides users with real-time, interactive dashboards for decision-making tasks.
Domo’s product portfolio includes the Domo AI line of AI software and tools, including the Agent Catalyst tool, launched in March, for creating autonomous AI agents. In 2025 Domo also bolstered its integration with a number of key data sources including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud BigQuery and Snowflake.
Five9
Mike Burkland
CEO
Five9 is a leading player in the contact center software space with its cloud-based Five9 Intelligent CX Platform that uses AI and automation to help customer service agents manage customer interactions across voice, email, chat and social media. The platform empowers service agents to focus on customers and create hyper-personalized customer experiences for better business outcomes.
In November Five9 extended its Five9 Genius suite with new AI capabilities across customer-agent routing, service quality management and analytics.
Intermedia Cloud Communications
Michael Gold
Chairman, CEO
Unified-Communications-as-a-Service heavyweight Intermedia offers an integrated platform of cloud-based business tools spanning voice, videoconferencing, email, chat and text, along with contact center, file sharing, backup and security applications. The company’s flagship Intermedia Unite is tightly integrated with Microsoft Teams.
Last year Intermedia expanded the capabilities of its offerings with new AI functionality such as the AI Agent Assist and AI Supervisor Assist for its Intermedia Intelligent Contact Center software.
MongoDB
Chirantan “CJ” Desai
President, CEO
MongoDB has established itself as one of the leading next-generation database companies and, with its Atlas cloud database, a significant force in the space for developing cloud-based AI applications. One major reason for MongoDB’s success is the strategic alliances it has established with hyperscalers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
In 2025 the company debuted MongoDB AMP, an AI-powered application modernization platform for transforming legacy applications into modern, scalable services. That followed the 2024 launch of the MongoDB AI Applications Program that strove to provide a complete IT stack and services for building and deploying AI applications at scale.
Nerdio
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Co-Founder, CEO
Nerdio’s popular cloud management platform simplifies the deployment, management and optimization of Microsoft’s virtual desktop services, including Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 Cloud PCs, by IT teams and MSPs.
The company has been steadily expanding those capabilities to include other Microsoft applications including Intune and M365. Last year Vladimirskiy told CRN that he wants MSPs to see the Nerdio platform as a means to have “total control over the entire Microsoft Cloud estate” for their customers.
In June Nerdio said it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, just three months after raising $500 million in a Series C funding round that valued the company at more than $1 billion.
Qlik
Mike Capone
CEO
Qlik has always been a leader in the business intelligence/data analytics space. But in recent years the company has been expanding its technology portfolio to encompass data analytics, AI, and data quality and integration with its Qlik Cloud Analytics platform and Qlik Talend Cloud data integration software.
In May 2025 Qlik launched Qlik Open Lakehouse, a fully managed lakehouse system based on Apache Iceberg that’s built into the Qlik Talend Cloud. The lakehouse works with structured and unstructured data across a broad range of cloud and legacy systems. Later in the year the company added to the lakehouse platform’s functionality with streaming data ingestion and real-time data transformation capabilities.
Also last year Qlik debuted new agentic AI capabilities within the Qlik Cloud platform, building on the Qlik Answers agentic assistant the company launched in 2024.
Salesforce
Marc Benioff
Co-Founder, Chair, CEO
Cloud pioneer Salesforce has continued its rapid growth as it expands beyond its CRM roots to provide cloud software for marketing automation, customer service, e-commerce, data analytics, collaboration, application development and more—all with a heavy emphasis on AI functionality and AI agents.
Perhaps Salesforce’s biggest move in 2025 was its $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, a developer of data management, integration and governance tools, with the aim of creating a more comprehensive data platforms for AI agents.
Salesforce expects to close its fiscal 2026 (Jan. 31) with around $41.5 billion in revenue—up 9 percent to 10 percent from one year earlier.
SAP
Christian Klein
CEO
SAP, arguably the leading company in the ERP space, has in recent years aggressively expanded its portfolio of cloud-based applications that build on its flagship SAP S/4HANA Cloud suite of ERP software. The company has actively encouraged its huge customer base to migrate to the company’s cloud applications from its older on-premises products.
SAP has been very active on the AI front as it expands the functionality of its SAP Business AI suite—including the Joule copilot software launched in 2023—that integrates AI into core business processes across ERP, CRM, human resources management and customer experience.
ServiceNow
Bill McDermott
Chairman, CEO
ServiceNow’s popular cloud-based platform is used by businesses and organizations to automate and manage digital workflows for IT and business functions and build custom applications on a centralized cloud database platform.
The company has been rapidly building AI and agentic AI capabilities into its platform to assist with workflow automation and into the company’s low-code application development tools.
Just before the holidays ServiceNow announced a $7.75 billion deal to acquire cyber exposure management vendor Armis in a move to boost its security workflow offerings. That closely followed ServiceNow’s deal in early December to buy identity security startup Veza.
Smartsheet
Rajeev Singh
CEO
Smartsheet’s Intelligent Work Management platform is a next-generation project management system that the company says unites people, data and AI to help plan, track, automate and report on complex projects and workflows.
The system serves as a central hub for communications and collaboration with features like customizable sheets, various view-types, real-time reporting, forms and automation to manage project resources and make data-driven decisions.
In November Smartsheet expanded the platform’s functionality with new generative AI, agentic AI and enterprise-grade features including Smart Assist, Smart Flows, Smart Columns and Smart Agents.
In November Smartsheet unveiled a significant expansion of its channel program in a bid to recruit global systems integrators to its partner lineup.
Snowflake
Sridhar Ramaswamy
CEO
Snowflake’s AI data cloud platform has become a critical component of the data management, data analysis, AI and application workloads for thousands of businesses and organizations.
The company’s fully managed platform supports data warehousing, data lake, data engineering, data science and application development tasks and can process structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
Snowflake Intelligence, unveiled in 2024 and generally available in November, is the company’s enterprise AI platform through which nontechnical users can ask questions about their company’s data using natural language queries and receive instant answers, insight and charts.
As 2025 drew to a close Snowflake in December unveiled a multiyear, $200 million partnership with AI research and development company Anthropic through which Anthropic’s Claude AI models will be available in the Snowflake platform.
Starburst
Justin Borgman
Founder, CEO
Starburst offers federated, high-performance data lakehouse services through its fully managed Galaxy data lakehouse platform, providing data querying capabilities for data analysis and AI tasks.
The Starburst platform is based on the company’s “Icehouse” architecture that combines the powerful Trino distributed SQL query engine with the open-source Apache Iceberg format.
In 2025 the company debuted Starburst AI, built on the company’s data platform, which brings together AI agents with unified enterprise data, governed data products and metadata to provide a simpler data infrastructure for agentic AI workflows.
In May Starburst was the recipient of a strategic investment of undisclosed size from global bank Citi through Citi’s Markets Innovation & Investments division. Citigroup is a Starburst customer.
ThoughtSpot
Ketan Karkhanis
CEO
Data analytics software developer ThoughtSpot takes the position that “AI is the new BI” and has evolved its technology into the ThoughtSpot Agentic Analytics platform that brings analytics to a wider audience of users through the use of AI agents, including the Spotter AI analyst agent, which automates analytical workflows.
In early 2025 ThoughtSpot expanded the data preparation capabilities of its cloud-based analytics platform with the new Analyst Studio for data teams, including analysts and data scientists.
Workday
Carl Eschenbach
CEO
Workday is a leading developer of cloud-based HR, finance and operations enterprise software, the combination of which streamlines business processes such as financial reporting, payroll and performance management and improves decision-making processes.
The company, founded by former PeopleSoft executives in 2005, got its start with its popular human resource management (including payroll and talent recruitment) applications and later expanded into financial management and planning applications.
In June 2025 the company debuted its Agent Gateway, new agent-to-agent technology that customers use to connect and manage AI agents from Workday and development partners in the company’s Workday Agent Partner Network.