The 20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors Of The 2017 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Software Vendors For 2017

Cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, cloud storage – all great for helping businesses stretch their IT dollars. But it's the cloud software: the CRM and accounting applications, the business analytics tools, the content management systems and the workflow software, that really help businesses and their employees get work done.

Here are 20 cloud software vendors – from established vendors such as SAP and SAS to startups such as Workato and Velostrata – that have caught our attention. Some are cool because of their leading-edge products while others are cool through their ability to broaden the adoption of cloud software.

Check out the rest of The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2017.

Cazena

Prat Moghe, CEO

Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.

Cazena's mission is to simplify complex big data processing with its Big Data-as-a-Service offerings, including cloud-based data lake and data mart services. In September Cazena extended its data lake service to Microsoft's Azure, joining a similar service offered on Amazon Web Services.

DocuSign

Daniel Springer, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

DocuSign develops electronic signature technology and digital transaction management services that facilitate electronic exchanges of contracts and signed documents. The company's offerings are a key component of many businesses' efforts to transform paper-based processes into digital transactions.

Domo

Josh James, CEO

Headquarters: American Fork, Utah

The Domo Business Cloud combines business intelligence, reporting, data visualization and dashboard capabilities, integrating data from multiple sources like databases, spreadsheets and social media with the focus on getting insight and information into decision-makers' hands.

FinancialForce

Tod Nielsen, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

FinancialForce.com provides cloud ERP applications, including sales, service, finance and HR, built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. FinancialForce, which is approaching a $100 million run rate, just named former Salesforce platform executive vice president Tod Nielsen as president and CEO.

InsideSales.com

Dave Elkington, CEO

Headquarters: Provo, Utah

InsideSales.com's cloud "sales acceleration" software uses predictive and prescriptive analytics to help inside sales representatives better target prospective customers, tailor their sales pitches and improve sales forecasts. In January the company raised $50 million in a Series E financing round.

Intacct

Robert Reid, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Intacct offers a line of cloud ERP and accounting applications including general ledger, purchasing, cash management, and accounts payable and receivable. Intacct is popular in the channel with solution providers and outsourcing partners delivering nearly half of the company's new business.

M-Files

Miika Makitalo, CEO

Headquarters: Dallas

M-Files markets an enterprise content management system that runs in the cloud, as well as in on-premise and hybrid environments. The company also develops packaged applications for such tasks as contract life-cycle management that run on the core software.

Natero

Craig Soules, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Natero develops "customer success" cloud software that sales and marketing professionals use to manage customer life cycles, including reducing customer churn and driving more recurring revenue. Natero's tools aggregate and mine customer data across multiple applications such as CRM and customer support.

New Relic

Lew Cirne, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

New Relic provides cloud-based performance management software that administrators and developers use to monitor and manage application performance and quickly diagnose and fix problems. In November New Relic debuted the Digital Intelligence Platform for gaining visibility and insight into a company's digital business.

Nintex

John Burton, CEO

Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.

Nintex is a developer of cloud workflow and content automation applications that customers use to simplify their business processes. "Digital transformation" is hot right now and the recently introduced Nintex Workflow Cloud platform enables organizations to automate and digitally transform processes.

Pax8

John Street, CEO

Headquarters: Greenwood Village, Colo.

Pax8, a value-added distributor for the channel, provides a marketplace that managed service providers use to provision their SMB customers with popular Software-as-a-Service applications from leading vendors such as Microsoft and Symantec. Pax8 also offers partners sales and marketing assistance, training and subscription billing services.

ProsperWorks

Jon Lee, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

ProsperWorks offers a suite of CRM applications for tracking customer contacts and sales leads. The apps are integrated with Google's G-Suite, including Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar and Gmail, allowing sales agents to work on proposals and interact with customers by leveraging Google's cloud-based tools.

SAP

Bill McDermott, CEO

Headquarters: Newtown Square, Pa.

The software giant has been steadily growing its lineup of cloud offerings, from specific applications such as SuccessFactors and Concur to cloud application suites such as Business ByDesign. The company also offers a cloud edition of its flagship S/4HANA ERP suite and the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

SAS

Jim Goodnight, CEO

Headquarters: Cary, N.C.

SAS made a splash in 2016 when it debuted Viya, an analytics and data visualization system that can run in either private or public cloud environments. The company is developing versions of its popular software, such as SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics, to run on Viya.

Snowflake Computing

Bob Muglia, CEO

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Snowflake Computing offers the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, a cloud alternative to on-premise data warehouse systems that can take years and millions of dollars to build. Snowflake is competing against cloud data warehouse services such as Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery.

Splunk

Doug Merritt, President, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

Splunk is the fast-growing developer of real-time operational intelligence software, including the Splunk Cloud edition that businesses use to analyze machine data for a range of business, IT and security applications. Splunk Cloud 6.5, introduced in September, included new machine-learning capabilities.

Tableau Software

Adam Selipsky, CEO

Headquarters: Seattle

Tableau Software, another fast-growing company in the big data space, markets popular business intelligence and data visualization software. Tableau Online is the cloud version of the product and in November the vendor began offering Tableau Online on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Treasure Data

Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Treasure Data competes in the cloud data warehouse space, providing its cloud-based Live Data Management platform that pulls in data from internal and external sources for real-time analysis tasks. Treasure Data raised $25 million in Series C funding in November.

Velostrata

Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Velostrata's cloud workload mobility technology helps businesses easily move existing applications to the public cloud while controlling and automating where data associated with those workloads reside. A November release of the vendor's system lets businesses test applications in the cloud before they migrate.

Workato

Vijay Tella, CEO

Headquarters: Cupertino, Calif.

Startup Workato develops a cloud automation and integration platform, making it possible to link more than 100 business applications and enable task automation across them without coding. The platform synchronizes data across multiple applications and performs error detection and handling tasks.