25 Coolest Emerging Vendors For 2010

Bubbling To The Top

Each year, hundreds of vendors emerge with new, innovative technologies. They cover every facet of the industry from storage and networking to growing areas like virtualization and cloud computing. From the nearly 200 companies that are part of CRN's 2010 Emerging Vendors list, here are 25 that caught our fancy because they are doing something cool.

Aerohive

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: HiveAP 300 Series 802.11n Cooperative Control Access Point

An emerging player in the hyper-competitive wireless LAN space for a few years now, Aerohive has earned plenty of notices for its so-called cooperative control architecture. This year began a major channel offensive for Aerohive, and its channel thought leadership ranks keep growing: Rob Pollock, former channel chief for SafeNet and a 20-year industry veteran, joined Aerohive in April as director of channel sales, armed with a playbook to punch up Aerohive’s profile that much more. ’Because of our simplicity as far as approach and pricing advantage, I think the resellers are finding incremental business and finding it nice that we deliver enterprise-level feature sets to large and small customers,’ said Cary Kosher, vice president of sales for the Americas.

AppDynamics

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: AppDynamics 2.0

Startup AppDynamics' namesake toolset that provides real-time visibility into the performance of distributed applications. It monitors applications running in cloud, virtual and physical/on-premise environments. It also monitors the network connections between applications and provides ’deep diagnostic’ capabilities (down to examining software code) to find the root causes of performance problems. And it helps scale applications up and down to meet capacity demands.

In June AppDynamics launched a strategic partner program to recruit resellers and complementary technology providers. The company is especially seeking partners who provide cloud computing strategic planning and consulting services.

AutoVirt

Headquarters: Nashua, N.H.

Year Founded: 2007

Key Product: AutoVirt file virtualization solution

AutoVirt is riding the wave of two hot technology trends: virtualization and file system centralization. The company's flagship AutoVirt software platform is designed for storage area networks and the cloud. AutoVirt helps companies get a handle on the data they're creating and moves that data to the right place based on how it's being used, helping to minimize the costs of securing and backing up that data. AutoVirt is sometimes compared to the likes of EMC, Compellent and NetApp. A key difference is that AutoVirt employs a hardware-agnostic, software-based approach to managing distributed data across multiple devices.

The company is bulking up its channel presence. It currently has 14 partners and plans to sign up between 50 and 100 more within the next 12 months.

Axcient

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Year Founded: 2007

Key Product: Hybrid Storage Service

Axcient offers a hybrid storage service that combines an on-premises storage appliance with an Internet-based storage service that together lets customers back data up both locally for fast restores and online for safe archiving. Data is encrypted and sent over the Internet to be stored in Axcient-hosted redundant storage. Incremental changes to that data is also encrypted and backed up to the on-site storage appliance.

Bountiful Wi-Fi

Headquarters: Bountiful, Utah

Year Founded: 2004

Key Product: BWRACWALL Series Controller

Bountiful Wi-Fi is fond of touting its products as ’the most powerful Wi-Fi products and solutions allowed by law,’ and gradually, it’s gained the type of channel support to back up that confidence. Its BWRACWALL Series Controller is one of the main products available through VARSense, a channel-oriented discounting program through which Bountiful Wi-Fi targets VARs, systems integrators and IT managers -- enterprise and SMB alike -- with particular emphasis on hospitality, health-care and education sales.

CloudShare

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

Year Founded: 2007

Key Product: CloudShare Enterprise

Today when a software developer or solution provider is selling a software product to a prospective customer, the company often has to set up an on-site system that replicates an entire IT environment. CloudShare Enterprise, an on-demand service, enables technology vendors to remotely provide product evaluations, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and training and certification without shipping machines -- and staff. Solution providers can use CloudShare themselves, as well as reference-sell the service to their customers under CloudShare’s recently launched affiliate program. CloudShare also offers CloudShare Pro, a scaled-down version of its product geared toward individual users.

CyberPatrol

Headquarters: Enola, Penn.

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: SiteSurv

After breaking away from Websense in 2008, CyberPatrol is focusing its efforts largely on the SMB, as well as libraries and the education verticals, with products specifically targeting smaller organizations. The company has gained ground in the SMB space with its cloud-based SiteSurv Web filtering service, and SiteSurv plus, its network-based Web filter. Web sites are compared to CyberPatrol's continually updated database of good and bad URLs, along with any additional Web sites the customer chooses to block.

Delfigo Security

Headquarters: Boston

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: DS Gateway

Delfigo’s flagship DS Gateway distinguishes itself in the marketplace by addressing two major problems regarding distribution and attribution. The authentication product, which is browser- and database-agnostic, is architected to accommodate cloud platforms, eliminating the hassle of hardware tokens and the need for flash installations and other software downloads. The product verifies user identity by comparing and contrasting an array of authentication variables, and then ranking an ascertained confidence factor on a scale of 1 to 100. If some factors don’t align, then the system will determine what level of access it will provide the user.

Dexrex Gear

Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.

Year Founded: 2005

Key Product: ChatSync

Dexrex Gear is riding the wave of messaging and text-based communications, and tying it into the explosion of social networking and media tools. How does Dexrex Gear do it? With ChatSync, a SaaS platform for enterprise data management that stores real-time text-based communications for compliance and e-discovery. And with ChatSync version 2.2, introduced earlier this year, the message archiving and management platforms expanded its capabilities from instant messaging and SMS messages to support social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. ChatSync also offers extensible APIs to plug into users’ devices, messaging clients, or messaging servers, and works in parallel with the messaging application to capture the media streams. The streams are captures into a centralized storage system from which it can be retrieved.

Flexera Software

Headquarters: Schaumburg, Ill.

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: InstallShield software installation

Flexera is in the enviable position of being a relatively young company with a well-known product. Flexera was spun out of Macrovision in April 2008, acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo and named Acresso. Last October the company changed its name to Flexera.

’In essence, it’s a new company,’ said Randy Littleson, Flexera senior vice president of marketing.

But the company’s products are known brands, particularly its flagship InstallShield software for installing software in Windows environments.

Flexera relies on the channel to help sell its InstallShield and InstallAnywhere software and its AdminStudio software deployment tool. The latter is particularly hot right now, Littleson said, as companies are using it to upgrade applications to virtualization platforms and the new Windows 7 operating system.

Green Plug

Headquarters: San Ramon, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: Green Plug Universal Power Protocol

Green Plug, a developer of universal connectors for power supplies, thinks the world really needs its ecofriendly technology. PCs and electronics generally come with an external power transformer that converts between 90V and 254V wall power to device-specific DC power, requiring a mess of different cables. Green Plug’s Greentalk protocol can be used to create a smart hub for powering any device, automatically tuning the power supply to a particular device’s power demands.

Immunet

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: Immunet Protect

Founded in July 2008, Immunet aims to address changes in the security landscape by bringing antivirus protection to the cloud. Specifically, its flagship Immunet Protect utilizes a "bottoms up" architecture that decentralizes malware analysis and detection. Subsequently, users' computers are always protected with up-to-date real-time defense technologies. In addition, Immunet customers also have access to what the company calls Collective Immunity -- a shared collective wisdom provided by its cloud-based products -- that captures information about both good and malicious code, which it then leverages and shares with the rest of the Immunet community.

InVisage Technologies

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: QuantumImage

InVisage Technologies’ QuantumImage light-collecting tech could be delivered in products as soon as 2011. That’s the year that the startup plans to launch full-scale production of its proprietary QuantumFilm, an extremely photosensitive material that is layered onto CMOS wafers used in small cameras such as those in many mobile phones. The upshot -- improved camera performance and image resolution.

Lucid Imagination

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Year Founded: 2007

Key Product: LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Solr

The search and discovery market is growing at a brisk pace of 28 percent annually, with 2007 revenue of $1.8 billion, according to IDC. Lucid Imagination offers certified distributions of Lucene and Solr, commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting and value-added software extensions. The company’s Web site serves as a knowledge portal for the Lucene community, with information and resources to help developers build and deploy Lucene-based solutions in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

Mezeo Software

Headquarters: Houston

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform

Mezeo Software provides software to help IT hosters, SaaS providers, MSPs, telcos, and ISPs provide multiple cloud storage offerings to their customers and resellers. Mezeo cloud storage is accessed through Web services APIs, in particular representational state transfer (REST) APIs that allow compatibility with a variety of access methods and which reduce the need to maintain session state, which lets multiple servers access the same resources. That allows a wide variety of devices to access cloud storage, including iPhones, Blackberries, Windows devices, and Web 2.0 devices.

Nasuni

Headquarters: Natick, Mass.

Year Founded: 2009

Key Product: Nasuni Filer virtual NAS file server

Nasuni makes public storage clouds available to midmarket customers with its Nasuni Filer virtual NAS appliance. The Filer connects customers to existing public storage clouds, including Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Iron Mountain, and Rackspace, while maintaining a local copy of data. Customers pay $300 per month for one virtual Filer, or less per month when signing up for longer plans, regardless capacity or number of users, along with the cost of using the public storage cloud.

Pano Logic

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: Pano System

Desktop virtualization is hot. Pano Logic knows this, as do its roughly 250 partners throughout North America. Pano Logic makes a "zero client" desktop virtualization technology with its Pano System. The offering, targeted mostly at midmarket-focused solution providers, is gaining traction in health care and education as it offers a centralization point for desktop management, promising to lower the TCO and reduce endpoint management to nil. It works like this: Pano System connects a Pano Device "zero client" endpoint to a VMware-powered service in lieu of a thick client PC, delivering management and servicing savings of around $1,500 per PC annually in mid-sized environments.

Quatrro BPO Solutions

Headquarters: Tarpon Springs, Fla.

Year Founded: 2004

Key Product: QResolve, SPTdesk

Business process outsourcing is no longer reserved for the Fortune 1000 types, according to Quatrro BPO Solutions. The company has developed customized and vertically specialized BPO services that are affordable to small-business customers. Outsourced tech support or other ticketing-based support has become affordable for SMB solution providers to offer to their customers, said Lisa Thostenson, vice president of channel development for Quatrro BPO Solutions. Quatrro BPO Solutions offers Qresolve for consumer help-desk solutions, SPTdesk for commercial customers and SPTdesk Online Backup for VARs to offer hosted storage solutions to customers. The company also offers more custom call center solutions and services geared toward finance and accounting customers, as well as legal, risk and mortgage industries.

QuorumLabs

Headquarters: Freemont, Calif.

Year Founded: 2008

Key Product: onQ

QuorumLabs is a margins monster, promising margins in the 50 percent range to partners reselling its one-click onQ data recovery offerings that can recover data and get businesses back up and running in minutes. With roughly 40 partners in the U.S., QuorumLabs aims is 100 percent channel focused and aims to align itself with midmarket-focused solution providers and managed service providers. QuorumLabs' onQ is a hybrid, virtualized data backup appliance that delivers a complete failover schema with one-click recovery so smaller organizations can avoid building out and grappling with the complicated multivendor backup solutions inside most enterprises.

Sentrigo

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: Hedgehog Enterprise

Sentrigo offers a full suite of products for vulnerability assessment, virtual patching and database monitoring/auditing. The company’s flagship product, Hedgehog Enterprise, provides database activity monitoring (DAM) and realtime intrusion prevention, protecting sensitive data from both external threats and misuse by privileged insiders. Hedgehog can be quickly deployed at small and midsize organizations but also scales to handle large enterprises, according to the company. It provides full visibility into all database activity and allows enterprises to enforce security policy and comply with regulatory requirements, such as PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

SoftLayer Technologies

Headquarters: Plano, Texas

Year Founded: 2005

Key Product: CloudLayer

SoftLayer Technologies built its data center services company around its ability to serve solution providers, not low pricing, according to George Karidis, chief strategy officer at the company. When SoftLayer launched four years ago, the company set out right away to white label all of its data center services to solution providers in order to make the services seamless to end users. ’The reason we did that is because we knew there was a market for resellers. Up until that point, there were few opportunities to take a hosted solution and mask it with something that was not your own infrastructure or data center. We decided up front that that’s core to our business,’ he said.

Early on, SoftLayer made all of its controls and services available through an API to enable partners to integrate its offerings with existing tools and systems, Karidis said. SoftLayer is geared toward small and midsize businesses, from 25 to 500 employees, Karidis said. An ideal VAR should be ’fairly tech savvy,’ i.e., more than just a reseller of hardware, he added.

Talari Networks

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: Adaptive Private Networking

Talari Networks likes to say that its Adaptive Private Networking (APN) ’does for enterprise WAN environments what RAID did for storage.’ APN leverages multiple IP bandwidth sources to WAN connections -- including DSL, cable and broadband -- and according to Talari, gives enterprises 30 to 100 times the bandwidth per dollar while reducing monthly WAN costs by as much as 90 percent. The old ways of maximizing WAN capability, such as Frame Relay and bandwidth, are not something enterprises should have to rely on any longer, Talari says. Having kicked off channel recruitment in 2010 behind former F5 Networks channel boss Tom Pettigrew, the company’s in growth mode.

Think Outside Of Box

Headquarters: La Verne, Calif.

Year Founded: 2009

Key Product: TOOB

Think Outside Of Box makes an immersive omnidome projection theater called the TOOB -- an IMAX theater for the home, so to speak. TOOB units come in a variety of sizes, including the 6-foot-by-3-foot-by-3-foot TOOB F and the 3-foot-by 1 1/2-foot-by-1-foot TOOB M, all the way up to the inflatable 16-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot version. The company is actively seeking North American channel distributors and already has channel partners in the U.K. and in South Korea. TOOBs are priced as low as $550 for the dome, without a projector or sound system.

Veeam Software

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Year Founded: 2006

Key Product: Veeam Backup and Replication

With a stable of more than 3,000 resellers and service provider partners worldwide, Veeam Software makes a line of tools that monitor and manage virtual IT environments. Specifically aimed at the mid-market, Veeam aligns itself with VMware as a VMware Technology Alliance Partner to deliver products for VMware management tasks like data backup and replication, system monitoring and reporting, and configuration and performance management. Veeam is no one-trick pony, though; it also supports Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software.

VersaReports

Headquarters: Atlanta

Year Founded: 2009

Key Product: VersaReports Universal Report Server

Report servers, such as SAP’s Crystal Reports and Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services, are essentially portals for back-end reporting engines that businesses use to schedule and manage the dissemination of reports to managers and employees.

So why are most report servers priced according to the number of users? ’That just seems wrong,’ said Andy Feibus, managing partner with Atlanta-based VersaReports LLC, in an interview. ’There’s no reason that report servers have to be priced on a per-user basis.’

VersaReports, founded in early 2009, developed VersaReports Universal Report Server, which uses Microsoft’s .Net framework to connect with a range of commercial and custom reporting engines. VersaReports’ software, which first hit the market in December, is priced at $4,995 per server for systems with no more than two CPUs (with an unlimited number of cores) and $14,995 for big servers with more than two CPUs.

VersaReports initially focused its sales efforts on report designers, Feibus said, but it’s seeking alliances with business intelligence and accounting software vendors and their resellers, and with solution providers with business intelligence and report design expertise. Resellers and end-customers can add their own logo to the VersaReports interface. The company already sells its product through Component Source, a major development tools distributor.



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