85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud: Page 4

The company secured $6 million in a second round of VC funding in June, bringing its total funding to $11 million. Funding came from Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.

Notable: Hadoop has been adopted by a few Internet giants, including Yahoo!, The New York Times and Facebook. The core technology was developed at Google. Google uses a related technology, MapReduce, to analyze data across cheap, distributed computers. Cloudera’s management team gained experience at Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

Here’s a video interview with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson.

28) Zuora
Zuora provides subscription billing and payment products that help cloud computing utilities, SaaS providers, and other subscription services get paid. While the company's solution can be used by any kind of subscription-based service, the company's tagline – powering the business cloud – makes it clear that its sights are set on the emerging cloud computing marketplace. Its product line includes Z-Billing, Z-Payments, Z-Force (billing and payments integrated with Salesforce.com), and Z-Commerce Platform (for cloud computing).

Notable: In its first year in business, Zuora signed up more than 100 customers, including Sun Microsystems, Box.net, and Cloud9 Analytics.

29) Reductive Labs
Reductive Labs developed Puppet, an open-source automated system administration engine.

Puppet’s declarative-based language enables engineers to programmatically encode semantics about why systems are configured a particular way. According to the company, this helps engineers build systems and administrators manage them “as code.”

By managing IT infrastructure as code, Puppet creates an audit trail, showing what systems are running and where, the history of all the work done on the system, and the policies that Puppet is carrying out.

The company’s second product, Facter, is an analysis tool for reporting system configuration and status. It too is open source.

According to Reductive Labs, such companies as Google, Digg, Twitter, New York Stock Exchange, Barclays Capital, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, Harvard Law, and Stanford University have adopted Puppet to help automate and mange their IT efforts.

Notable: Reductive Labs closed a $2 million series A round of funding in June. The round was led by True Ventures and included private investors. CEO and founder Luke Kanies was previously a product design specialist with BladeLogic. He also has a background as a system admin.

30) CloudSwitch
Still in the pre-product stage, CloudSwitch intends to offer software appliances for cloud infrastructure. The company says that it’s building a software switch that protects enterprises from the “complexity, risks and potential lock-in of the cloud, turning cloud resources into a flexible, cost-effective extension of the corporate data center.”

Ellen Rubin, formerly head of marketing at Netezza, and John Considine, previously Director of Engineering for Sun’s Platform Products Group, founded the company in 2008, incubating it at Matrix Partners.

Since then, this stealth-mode startup has generated a heck of a lot of buzz and pulled down a decent amount of funding for a company only beginning to beta test its product. CloudSwitch has raised two rounds of VC funding totaling $15.4 million from Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Atlas Ventures.

Notable: John McEleney joined the company in June and serves as CEO and President. McEleney was previously with SolidWorks, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dassault Systems S.A., where he served as CEO from 2001 to 2007 and as a Director since 2000. During McEleney’s tenure, SolidWorks grew to have over 40,000 global customers, $350 million in revenues and a market valuation of $1.5 billion.

31) Apprenda
If you're a SaaS vendor or building a private cloud to manage your internal applications, Apprenda's SaaSGrid Platform hopes to make the process easier with key features like multi-tenancy, grid scalability, metering and monetization, and billing management. You can purchase a license to deploy SaaSGrid in your own datacenter, or you can access it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) through Apprenda's hosting partner Peer 1.

Notable: Apprenda founders Sinclair Schuller, Matt Ammerman, and Abe Sultan write an SaaS Blog that discusses the changes Cloud Computing and SaaS are bringing to the technology industry.

32) Cordys
Cordys provides software to develop, manage and monitor business processes and enterprise clouds. Cordys’ main offering is its Business Operations Platform (BOP), which is a suite consisting of Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and SaaS Deployment Frameworks (SDF) software.

Taken together, this positions Cordys in the PaaS space. The company’s cloud offering seeks to address what the company sees as the two main areas of cloud computing, “the Services and Application Cloud and the Infrastructure Cloud.”

The Service and Application Cloud is basically pay-as-you-go SaaS. The Infrastructure Cloud follows the more standard cloud infrastructure (and PaaS) definition of on-demand, hosted capacity, or as Cordy’s calls it the “Pay as you Grow” usage model.

Notable: Process Factory software allows developers to apply the mashup principle to existing cloud applications, creating “MashApps.” Cordys Enterprise Cloud Orchestration platform is intended as a kind of middleware that will bridge the many various cloud flavors, from private clouds to hosted ones – to whatever specialized hybrids pop up as the space evolves. Customers include Comcast, NYSE, the World Bank, China Netcom and Tata Motors.

33) Elastra
Elastra provides cloud management software for the enterprise. Cordys intends to bridge public and private clouds, envisioning itself as a cloud management provider.

According to Elastra, while cloud computing provides a flexible means to consume computing resources, “IT organizations struggle with the lack of policy-based control and the manual processes required to architect, deploy and manage complete enterprise-grade application systems in these environments.”

The Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server enables IT organizations to deliver flexible policy-based computing solutions to the businesses they serve. Enterprise Cloud Server is intended to accelerate the delivery of architected applications by enabling policy-based designs to be realized in IT-controlled private and public computing clouds.

The company is backed by $14.6 million in funding. Its most recent funding round was led by Bay Partners, with Amazon.com and existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participating. (That’s right, this is a cloud company playing with money from the cloud leader, Amazon.)

Notable: The company is led by founder, President and CEO Kirill Sheynkman, who previously founded two other startups, both of which were later acquired, Sheynkman spent the early part of his career with Oracle and Microsoft. The rest of the management team hails from Oracle, BEA Systems, Symantec and eWorld Systems.

34) Arista Networks
No matter how disruptive cloud computing is supposed to be, it still must use regular old hardware like servers, load balancers and switches. Arista Networks’ 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are designed for “large datacenter and computing environments.”

Arista’s secret sauce, its Extensible Operating System (EOS), is software based on a multi-process state sharing architecture that “completely separates networking state from the processing itself.” The result is automatic fault recovery and the ability to apply incremental software updates that don’t affect the state of the system.

Notable: Arista has an impressive management team, headed by Andy Bechtolsheim and Jayshree Ullal. Bechtolsheim, who co-founded and served as Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, serves as Chief Development Officer and Chairman. President and CEO Jayshree Ullal previously served as an SVP at Cisco, where she ran the Data Center, Switching and Services Group, which brought in $10 billion in annual revenue.

Customers include Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Northwestern University and BitGravity. The company has also inked cloud-related partnerships with Citrix, VMware, NetApp and several others.

35) SIMtone
Formerly known as XDS, Inc., SIMtone offers two primary product lines: Its USP line lets network operators manage and deliver cloud computing services to its customers. Its VSP line helps users create a "cloud computing-enabled" infrastructure and is available in Business, Enterprise, and Service Provider editions.

SIMtone also sells a line of cloud-computing terminals. They look like laptops, but they never store or process any data. Instead, they just connect users to cloud computing services.

Notable: A privately-held company, SIMtone has financial backing from Motorola Ventures, Brightstar Corporation, and Kodiak Venture Partners.

36) Univa UD
Univa UD offers solutions for the management of HPC (High Performance Computing) systems, data center automation and cloud computing. In May, the company released Reliance 3.0, an application service governor product for cloud computing enablement.

Reliance functions as an “intelligence layer” for cloud-based infrastructures, making decisions about where to allocate pooled computing resources to ensure that application SLAs are met. The 3.0 version features a “drop-in approach” that allows users to implement service governance without replacing existing systems.

In late July, the company released its UniPlan product, which simulates project workloads for applications and then performs detailed scenario analyses to identify potential bottlenecks or performance gaps. A week later the company launched UniCloud 2.0, which enables the formation of a cloud environment that unifies provisioning, configuration and virtualization management with application configuration into a single web-services-based framework.

Notable: Univa UD is led by CEO Jason Liu, who formerly served as CEO of Intrinsic Technologies. Customers include Pathwork Diagnostics and Corus. The company has raised $24 million in funding. Investors include River Cities Capital Funds, ARCH Venture Partners, New World Ventures, Appian Ventures and OCA Ventures.

37) LongJump
LongJump is the SaaS and cloud offering of Relational Networks, which also offers CRM and SFA solutions for the media industry.

LongJump positions itself in the PaaS sector, providing a business application platform that enables IT organizations to create their own private clouds. Included tools provide management and security over applications. Additionally, service providers can use LongJump to launch their own SaaS offerings.

Notable: The company’s platform offers a multi-tenant development and runtime environment, supporting the creation of multi-tenant applications. LongJump provides a visual development environment entirely based on open software and standards.

38) rPath
One of the pioneers in the virtual appliance space, rPath offers two separate products that make cloud computing easier: rBuilder, available as a download or as a hosted service, simplifies the process of creating virtual appliances so that applications are easier to deploy in the cloud. And rPath Lifecycle Management Platform makes it easier to manage and update applications whether they are deployed physically, virtually, or in the cloud.

Notable: In early August, rPath announced that Sony Pictures Imageworks would be using rPath technology to manage its animation applications.

And while it's not quite up to Imageworks’s standards, rPath has created an animated video of its own that explains cloud computing in terms that almost anyone can understand.

39) ElasticHosts
UK-based ElasticHosts provides “flexible servers in the cloud.” The company is certainly ambitious, competing head to head with Amazon and Google. ElasticHosts argues that its solution is “tailored for web hosting, unlike Amazon EC2, which is a less targeted virtualization solution.” In contrast with Google Apps, ElasticHosts supports multiple technologies, whereas Google “is limited to Python applications running in their proprietary environment.”

Notable: ElasticHosts was founded by Chris Webb, serving as CEO, and Richard Davies, CTO. Davies was previously with McKinsey & Company, where he advised senior management at a large number of global high-tech and telecoms clients. Webb formerly served as a consultant for a number of UK startups.

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