25 Coolest Emerging Vendors

Forget Cisco, Microsoft and HP. Upstart emerging vendors are socking it to the lumbering old school players with innovative cutting-edge technology backed up by channel programs that pack more margin and support.

Here is our list of the 25 coolest emerging vendors selected from our list of 178 companies in the CRN 2008 Emerging Vendors report. These are the sleek red Ferraris of the technology set zooming past your parents' Volvo.

Product line: Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart WLAN system is a centralized wireless LAN solution designed specifically for the channel

Featured Product (pictured): Zoneflex Director

Channel Recruitment Goal: More than 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: An enterprise fixed mobile convergence platform sold through the channel to extend enterprise voice and unified communications to cell phones

Featured Product (pictured): RoamAnywhere Mobility Router

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for broad national coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider with a strong background in WLAN and unified communications

Product Line: Linux-based, open-source routing and security software and appliances that run on standard x86-based hardware

Featured Product (pictured): Vyatta 514

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad national coverage

Ideal Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Product Line: The MoGo Mouse is a revolutionary, business card-size, Bluetooth-enabled mouse that stores and charges inside your laptop's PC card or ExpressCard/54 slot

Featured Product (pictured): MoGo Mouse

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Volume-oriented reseller

Product Line: Teneros provides a family of application continuity appliances for high availability and disaster recovery of Microsoft Exchange

Featured Product (pictured): Application Continuity Appliance

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Product Line: VarPhonex provides tools and features for VARs to sell the private-label VoIP service under their own brand names

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Networking- or telephony-focused service provider

Product Line: Lightweight, voice-controlled communication devices that allow users to converse over a wireless LAN (802.11b/g)

Featured Product (pictured): Vocera "badge"

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: The Aveksa Access Governance Platform includes Aveksa Compliance Manager and Aveksa Role Manager

Featured Product (pictured): Aveska Dashboard

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: Offers a range of hosted e-mail services, for e-mail security, archiving, discovery and recovery and business continuity

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: SMB-focused solution provider

Product Line: A unified end-point security solution

Featured Product (pictured): Stormshield

Channel Recruitment Goal: 250 to 500 partners for limited U.S. regional coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: Packet capture and stream-to-storage appliance that captures and records at full-line rates, even on 10-GB networks.

Featured Product (pictured): Solera DS Appliance

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: A commercial-grade open-source security gateway for the SMB market

Featured Product (pictured): Untangle Gateway Platform

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: MSP

Product Line: Storage consolidation, centralized management, automation and advanced data protection in Windows, Linux and other server environments

Featured Product (pictured): Swarm 3000

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: A cost-effective, agentless storage reporting platform leveraging all of the benefits of Web 2.0 architecture.

Featured Product (pictured): Aptare Storage Console

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Storage-focused VAR

Product Line: An information recovery platform for delivering backup and recovery as a service Featured Product (pictured): Televaulting

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Wireless-, convergence-, or security-focused VAR

Product Line: CAStor is a scalable, high-performance and cost-effective CAS (content addressed storage) based product that runs on any x86 hardware

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Volume-oriented VAR

Product Line: Application-Aware Storage systems for midsize and enterprise organizations

Featured Product (pictured): Pillar Axiom

Channel Recruitment Goal: No set number of partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: Backup solutions

Featured Product (pictured): Rebit Ridiculously Simple Backup

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Small-business-focused solution provider

Product Line: Provides storage solutions that deliver iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication functions from a single virtualized storage platform

Featured Product (pictured): RelData 9240 System

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Product Line: Exanodes' software solution creates a shared storage system using the cluster's own hard disks, which are customarily underused

Featured Product (pictured): Exanodes GUI

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Product Line: LiveAction QoS Module tool is for QoS monitoring and configuration

Featured Product (pictured): Live Action

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for broad national coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: An open and interoperable AJAX framework for building and running rich Internet applications.

Featured Product (pictured): Turbo Enterprise Web 2.0

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for broad national U.S. coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Product Line: Gaviri Universal Search Operating System runs across all storage devices, computer networks, the Web and all operating systems

Featured Product (pictured): Gaviri PocketSearch

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad national U.S. coverage

Ideal Partner: All

Product Line: A network of secure online workspaces that use social networking principles

Featured Product (pictured): Huddle.net

Channel Recruitment Goal: 51 to 250 partners for broad international coverage

Ideal Partner: SMB-focused solution provider

Product Line: A Web application monitoring solution that gives visibility into application performance as experienced by real end users.

Featured Product (pictured): TrueVision Express

Channel Recruitment Goal: 50 partners or fewer for limited international coverage

Ideal Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider