85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud: Page 6

53) Kaavo
Kaavo provides an “application-centric management and security solution for cloud computing.” Kaavo contrasts its offering versus “infrastructure-centric” management tools. According to Kaavo, tools developed for managing applications tied to specific physical hardware cannot deal with the scale and complexity of applications in the cloud.

Kaavo’s IMOD (Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand) management suite, in contrast, is purpose-built to manage virtual resources in cloud environments. Features include a single-click interface to deploy, start and stop applications in a multi-server setting; the ability to create encrypted disk volumes; auto-scaling based on pre-defined triggers; the ability to monitor CPU, memory, I/O and disk space of virtual servers; auto-recovery tools, and more.

Notable: Kaavo was founded in November 2007 by Jamal Mazhar, who serves as CEO and whose previous experience was with ING, where he managed integration, development and continual improvements to ING’s IT assets. Before that, he was the lead architect of the GE Capital e-Business team. In other words, Mazhar has an IT pro’s background and reflects this in Kaavo’s offerings.

54) Layered Technologies
Based in Plano, Texas, Layered Tech started out as a typical web hosting company. It has used that experience, however, to build out cloud infrastructure and service offerings.

Truth be told, this is where most web hosting is moving eventually, but some hosting companies are embracing virtualization and cloud computing better than others.

A look at Layered Tech’s cloud and managed services offerings shows just about everything you can get from cloud providers like FlexiScale or GoGrid.

Notable: In January, Layered Tech launched its Astro platform, which is intended to simplify the provisioning of and streamline the management of hosted servers.

55) MultiFactor
As its name implies, MultiFactor is a multi-factor authentication company. However, MultiFactor’s all-software solution, SecureAuth, does more than standard authentication. Designed from the ground up to work with web services, it is more accurately described as an “identity enforcement solution.”

One of the troubles with authentication in the cloud is linking cloud-based applications back to enterprise-based identity stores. Typically, this requires customized coding and complex APIs.

The other approach is to move identity management entirely to the cloud, but unless you’re an SMB or startup, it’s doubtful you’ll take that approach. MultiFactor believes that as IT moves more and more processes to the cloud, identity will be one of the last things to remain in house. It’s simply too risky for most enterprises to give up even the slightest bit of control over identity.

Designed as a web service, SecureAuth ties into existing enterprise identity stores, such as Active Directory, and enforces the identities, roles and policies out to enterprise applications, be they in-house, web-based or cloud-hosted applications.

SecureAuth works by authenticating both the client and the server for each session via a non-exportable cryptographic credential. When authorized users log into the network for the first time or log in with a new device, they’re redirected to SecureAuth’s registration system, which can be customized to use out-of-band contact, knowledge-based questions, or other organization-specified means to serve as an additional identity factor.

SecureAuth has been tailored to work with several cloud-based offerings, including Salesforce.com and Google Apps. The software can serve as the engine for SSO and be integrated with VPNs for remote users.

Notable: The company is backed by private investors, having raised approximately $8 million. MultiFactor is managed by Craig Lund, CEO, who formerly managed IBM’s security sales teams for the U.S., Canada and Latin America; Garret Grajek, COO, who was previously with Netegrity, where he led the installation of SiteMinder, the security suite that controls all user access to the E*Trade Financial Services website; and Thomas Stewart, CFO, who previously held senior positions in both finance and marketing at Intel.

56) MX Logic/McAfee
MX Logic is another security company hoping to take advantage of cloud computing’s inherent security weaknesses. MX Logic’s expertise is with email and messaging security and website protection. The company also offers message archiving and disaster recovery services.

Last month, the company upgraded its product line to address cloud-based messaging services. The MX Logic Control Console gives users a single interface to manage accounts and service settings, including pre-authentication, password and security-question pages, outbound message filtering and more.

The company is led by John Street, Chairman and CEO, Pete Khanna, President and COO, and Scott Chasin, CTO. Street came to MX Logic from USA.NET, where he served as Chairman and CEO and raised over $100 million of private equity financing. Khanna was formerly EVP of Inflow. Chasin previously served as CTO and “Chief Visionary” for USA.NET.

Notable: On July 30, as this story was being written, McAfee announced an agreement to purchase MX Logic for approximately $140 million in cash at closing, with an earn-out of up to an additional $30 million in cash if certain performance targets are met.

According to McAfee, the addition of MX Logic will give them “the most comprehensive cloud-based security portfolio in the industry.” That’s debatable, but McAfee’s side of the debate would be a strong one.

McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence now protects more than 33 million nodes through cloud-based security intelligence, analyzes 100 billion messages per month and rates 1.9 billion e-commerce and search transactions each day.

For cloud-based computing, McAfee’s “Security-as-a-Service” provides vulnerability assessments, cybercrime scanning services, email and messaging security, business continuity services and more.

Notable: The acquisition of MX Logic is expected to close in Q3 2009.

57) XCalibre
Web-hosting provider XCalibre is also the company behind FlexiScale, a Europe-focused cloud computing utility. Despite their relatively small size and narrow target market, XCalibre isn't afraid to take on the big boys, offering a chart comparing FlexiScale to Amazon and Rackspace and making the dubious claim that FlexiScale is "Europe’s only Cloud computing solution." They boast true pay-as-you-go pricing with no contracts, 100% SLA, and multiple OS support.

Notable: Flexiscale customers include RSS solution providerMediafed, cloud computing technology vendor CohesiveFT, and social networking software maker SocialGO.

58) Zetta
While it looks and acts a lot like a local file server, customers actually access Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage over the Internet via standard protocols such as NFS and CIFS. Although the storage solution can be used by companies of any size, Zetta primarily focuses on serving large enterprises in the manufacturing, rich media, and financial services sectors. Through the service, customers can store and retrieve up to hundreds of petabytes of unstructured data, without purchasing any hardware or paying for unused capacity.

Notable: In July, Zetta was named to the AlwaysOn Global 250, and in April, Zetta won first place for storage infrastructure at Under the Radar 2009.

59) ParaScale
ParaScale argues that advances in computer hardware over the past decade make it possible to deliver solutions for file storage, management, and distribution that offer far more capacity and higher read/write bandwidth, while being easier to manage and less expensive to purchase and operate.

Nothing new there, Moore’s law applied to storage, but ParaScale has followed this vision to offer cloud storage software optimized for such applications as video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance management and medical image remote diagnosis.

As opposed to most of the other vendors calling themselves cloud storage providers, ParaScale does not provide a hosted storage service. Rather, their solution is targeted to enterprises, which can then use that technology to create their own public or private clouds.

The software “runs in user space on any commodity server running standard Linux and forms a highly scalable, self-managing storage cloud, with massive capacity and parallel throughput.”

Notable: Founded in 2004, ParaScale secured a $11.37 million Series A round of funding last summer from Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

CEO Sajai Krishnan was formerly GM of the StoreVault Division of NetApp, responsible for creating and developing the division’s multinational efforts within the mid-market segment. Founder and CTO Cameron Bahar previously led the design, deployment, and operation of Scale8’s distributed Internet storage service and, at the HP Enterprise Systems Technology Lab, developed system software for disk volume management, data security and utility data center management.

60) NComputing
Technically, NComputing is better defined as a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) provider. However, NComputing makes the savvy observation that while cloud computing is being hyped as a way to bring down IT and data center costs, it does nothing to bring down end-device costs.

Marry VDI to cloud computing – which major virtualization players like VMware and Citrix are doing too – and you can do some serious cost cutting.

For now, NComputing’s major value proposition is cost. At recent tradeshows, like Interop and CloudWorld, NComputing demoed a “$70 cloud desktop.” According to the company, today’s PCs are pretty much like supercomputers, and 99% of all PCs users aren’t doing any supercomputing. (And the compute- and memory-intensive things they’re accessing at work, they probably shouldn’t be.)

NComputing takes a single PC and delivers it to as many as 30 users, who use NComputing end terminals that consist of bundled monitors, keyboards and mice. This is the age old thin-computing model, but the cost game is a dubious one for computing vendors. With netbook (and even desktop) prices falling through the floor, is a solution like this worth it?

Perhaps. If you look at consumption beyond the simple computing calculation and factor in power, patching, updates, etc., a solution like this could gain traction. NComputing claims that it slashes acquisition and support costs by as much as 70%.

The trouble is that the barrier to entry for competitors isn’t all that high. Even more troubling is that behemoths like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and even Google are stomping around this market space. For now, the company will try to avoid these major players by targeting the education and nonprofit sectors and emerging markets like Eastern Europe and Africa.

Notable: NComputing is backed by more than $28 million in VC funding from Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Korea’s Daehong Technew Corporation. NComputing certainly has cheap-computing pedigree. CEO Stephen Dukker previously founded eMachines.

61) NetSuite
NetSuite successfully built its business around the eponymous business software suite that includes accounting, BI, CRM, e-commerce and ERP. SuiteCloud, NetSuite’s business-class cloud offering, provides SaaS infrastructure, the bundle of business software tools included in the original NetSuite, a so-called business software OS (NS-BOS) that serves as a development platform, and an ecosystem called SuiteApp.com that provides related apps that hook into the SuiteCloud platform.

Last November, NetSuite entered into a partnership with HP to target cloud computing solutions to SMBs.

Notable: The company (originally named LetLedger) was founded by Evan Goldberg, who serves as Chairman and CTO, and Larry Ellison of Oracle. Goldberg had been a VP at Oracle before founding LetLedger. Ellison no longer serves in a management capacity or occupies a board seat at NetSuite. Zach Nelson, President and CEO, has held a variety of executive positions spanning marketing, sales, product development and business strategy with such companies as Oracle, Sun, and McAfee/Network Associates.

62) Nirvanix
Nirvanix provides a cloud storage service, a service that the company argues will change storage into a utility. Think of Nirvanix’s SDN (Storage Delivery Network) as a cross between a storage virtualization and an application delivery network service.

Unlike other storage services, which write applications to specific storage hardware, SDN takes the virtualization approach and looks like a single drive to applications, regardless of where in terms of hardware or geography that storage is actually located.

That’s all well and good for backups and disaster recovery, but what about applications actually residing in the cloud? For these, Nirvanix serves up data from the nearest data center to boost response time. Nirvanix offers a number of storage-related services for large file transfers, collaboration, archiving, offsite data protection and more.

Notable: Nirvanix raised more than $23 million in funding from Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures and the European Founders Fund. President and CEO Jim Zierick previously held CEO positions with Aspyra, a provider of clinical and diagnostic information solutions for the healthcare industry, and LogicalApps, a provider of embedded controls software for enterprise applications.

Customers include Axentra, The Planet, Arizona State University and NASA. An ASU-NASA project is storing images from the recently launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with Nirvanix.

63) OpSource
Founded in 2002, OpSource provides cloud-based operations infrastructure and services for SaaS and Web-based businesses. The company’s flagship platform, OpSource On-Demand, “delivers hundreds of applications on-demand to millions of users and manages billions of transactions everyday.”

OpSource On-Demand includes both operations-side and business-side features that help organizations achieve ROI for new applications quickly. Operational features include security, automatic backup, disaster recovery, application monitoring and management, database management and more.

Business features include on-demand billing services, customer usage analytics, end-user support and OpSource Connect, which provides “infrastructure for two-way web services interactions, allowing customers to consume and publish applications across a common web services infrastructure.”

The company is led by CEO Treb Ryan, who co-founded the company with CTO John Rowell. Ryan was previously President of the Americas for Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN). Rowell formerly served as VP of Operations for MFN.

Notable: OpSource closed a $10 million Series E round of funding in February from NTT, Velocity Venture Capital, Key Venture Partners and Artiman Ventures. This brings total funding to date to approximately $64 million.

In March, OpSource entered into an agreement with Akamai to give their joint customers the ability to marry Akamai’s content distribution and route optimization services with OpSource’s service suite.

64) CohesiveFT
CohesiveFT calls its Elastic Server platform a “web-based ‘factory’ for assembling, testing, and deploying custom stacks and servers to virtual machines or clouds.” Elastic Server allows customers to quickly define and deploy servers for clouds and virtual environments, such as Amazon EC2, VMware and Xen.

The idea is to target companies not yet comfortable with all-out cloud computing, allowing them to test smaller deployments. Users are able to mix and match several open source projects, such as Apache, Ruby on Rails and MySQL, with a range of open-source OSes, all running on virtual machines.

The company also offers a cloud security product, VPN-Cubed. Currently only available for EC2 users, VPN-Cubed provides a secure overlay network that allows customers to control the addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for devices deployed to the cloud. As its name suggests, think of it as a cloud-specific VPN.

CohesiveFT is managed by Craig Heimark, Chairman; Patrick Kerpan, CTO; Dwight Koop, COO; and Phil Clarke, VP of Business Development. The team’s background is with SBC Warburg, Borland Software, Swiss Banks capital markets and Inforte.

Notable: Founded in July 2006, CohesiveFT’s Investors include Chess Venture Ltd., OCA Ventures, Clay Struve and Nauiokas Park.

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