10 Hot Tech Startups For July

Disruptive Technology Startups Top The July 2013 Emerging Vendor List

No hazy, lazy days of summer for these startups. Many of the companies on this month's list are challenging the big, established players in the IT industry.

From Base's "post-PC era" CRM that's taking on Salesforce.com to Cumulus Networks' Linux-based challenge to Cisco to the mobile development system offered by AnyPresence, startups aren't fazed by the idea of competing against the IT industry equivalent of those muscle-bound guys who rule the beach in the summertime.

Don't kick sand in these guys' faces. They'll just kick it back.

AnyPresence

AnyPresence offers a mobile development platform that, according to the company, dramatically reduces the time and cost of mobile-enabling enterprise business processes, products and services. The goal is providing organizations the ability to assemble and deploy back-end servers, native iOS, native Android and HTML5 mobile Web apps without platform "lock-in."

Last month the Reston, Va.-based AnyPresence debuted an API service for building and deploying cross-platform mobile apps, what the company called a "meta platform" for adding mobile application development functionality to existing software.

Co-founded in 2010 by CEO Anirban "AC" Chakrabarti, the company won the 2013 Disruptive Strategy Award at the Strategy Innovation Awards at the Chief Strategy Officer Summit in May.

Base

Base develops what it calls the next generation of cross-platform CRM applications and is competing directly with industry giant Salesforce.com.

Saying it designs its software for "the post-PC era," Base is putting a lot of focus on its mobile CRM offerings, including native applications for iPad and Android tablets and versions for the Apple iPhone and Android- and Windows-based phones.

Founded in 2009, Base is headquartered in Chicago, although CEO Uzi Shmilovici is from Israel and two co-founders are from Poland where the company has a development office. The company has raised nearly $8 million in venture financing.

Boundary

Boundary offers cloud-based application and network monitoring software that combines real-time data streaming, alerts, analytics and visualization technology that help businesses manage their cloud and on-premise IT systems.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in January 2011, offers a free version of the product with a limit of 1 GB of application traffic.

This week Boundary joined Google's cloud platform partner program, offering its application monitoring and visualization software to businesses that use the Google Compute Engine to run applications. "Our service provides unprecedented visibility into application performance, and because we do it in real time, users can adjust on the fly to [system] fluctuations," said Boundary CEO Gary Read.

Cirro

Cirro develops a next-generation data federation system for analytic data services. The cloud-based software offers a way to access, explore and analyze large volumes of data of different types on heterogeneous platforms using standard SQL. Users can even analyze data in Excel using the company's Analyst for Excel tool.

Earlier this year the company said it would support EMC's Pivotal HD distribution of the Hadoop big data platform. The San Juan Capistrano, Calif., company, headed up by CEO Mark Theissen, was founded in 2010.

Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks exited stealth mode in June, unveiling its Linux-based network operating system the company said brings the flexibility and low-cost benefits of open standards to data center networks dominated by Cisco and other vendors.

Linux helped lower IT costs by replacing servers based on proprietary technology. Cumulus Networks' goal is to have the same impact on data center networks where proprietary technologies reign. Such networks have tightly integrated hardware and software, are complex and expensive, and lack common tools for network management, automation and monitoring.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, founded in 2010 by former Cisco and VMware networking engineers, including CEO JR Rivers, has raised more than $15 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and other investors including former VMware CEO Diane Greene.

Datadog

IT managers are increasingly turning to DevOps methods as a way to bridge the software development gap between development and operations. One barrier to success is that IT performance data needed by DevOps teams is scattered across multiple systems.

Datadog's software-as-a-service monitoring and data analytics platform and the company's recently unveiled Screenboards create a unified view of IT KPIs, events and metrics. That information helps businesses develop and release new applications on schedule, reduce downtime and improve application performance. Today the system is processing 15 billion data points per day.

Founded in 2010, New York-based Datadog, raised $6.2 million in first-round financing last year. It's top executive is CEO Olivier Pomel.

Nutanix

Nutanix offers the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, which combines server and storage technology in one 2U appliance for running any virtual workload. The converged infrastructure system eliminates the need for network-based storage architecture, including storage area networks or network-attached storage.

Founded in 2009 by CEO Dheeraj Pandey, San Jose-based Nutanix began shipping its products in late 2011, and in May the company said it achieved an annual sales run-rate of $80 million after just six quarters. The company raised $71 million in three rounds of financing.

Last month the company introduced the NX-1000 appliance for mid-size companies and branch office deployments, as well as the NX-6000 system for data and capacity workloads.

Risk I/O

Risk I/O has developed what it calls the first "vulnerability intelligence platform" that collects global attack data from third-party threat-information feeds to help businesses quickly evaluate where they are most likely to be attacked.

The company's cloud-based system utilizes big data technology and predictive analytics to prioritize vulnerability data coming in from a business's IT systems, including Web applications, databases, networks and servers. That data is cross-referenced against threat data from other Risk I/O users and threat data repositories like RiskDB.

Chicago-based Risk I/O was co-founded in 2010 by CEO Ed Bellis and CTO Jeff Heuer and raised $5.25 million in first-round financing in November.

SelectHub

SelectHub emerged from stealth mode in June and launched its SelectHub service for IT product evaluation, vendor sourcing and procurement. The value of SelectHub's service, according to the company, is its ability to foster IT and business manager collaboration around IT purchasing decisions, reducing the amount of money businesses waste through poor IT purchasing decisions and failed IT projects.

The company cited studies showing that software projects have a failure rate as high as 68 percent and more than 10 percent of software purchases end up as unused "shelfware."

SelectHub CEO Venkat Devraj previously founded Stratavia, a database and middleware automation technology that Hewlett-Packard acquired in August 2010. Denver-based SelectHub was founded in 2012.

Zaloni

Zaloni develops software and services around the Apache Hadoop big data platform. It's core product is the Bedrock Data Management Platform for integrating and managing huge volumes of data in a Hadoop system and building applications that leverage that data.

Last month the company launched Bedrock Data Management Platform 2.0 with new data ingestion, metadata and catalog search capabilities and Hadoop-based data masking and workflow orchestration features.

"Enterprises today simply can not afford the significant cost or inordinate amount of time required to build and deploy complex data pipelines in Hadoop," said CEO Ben Sharma. "Bedrock 2.0 draws upon our research and development capabilities and proven expertise in big data and analytics to deliver an end-to-end Hadoop-based data management solution."

San Jose, Calif.-based Zaloni was founded in 2007.