10 Hot Emerging Vendors For July 2010

Step right up and get what may very well be your first look at 10 hot new IT vendors that are exploding onto the scene. Each month CRN profiles 10 new vendors that are looking to shake up the industry in various technology segments, from security to cloud computing, from software to hardware.

These startups know the importance of the channel and are looking to align with valued channel partners to get their names and products out.

Take a look and get introduced to 10 vendors that are ready for prime time.

faceVsion

Company: faceVsion Technology USA

Tech Sector: Video communications

Key Product: faceVsion TouchCam N1

The Lowdown: faceVsion was founded in 2009 in Fremont, Calif. Its faceVsion TouchCam N1 is a HD video camera with an embedded H.264 codec chip and dual microphones, so it can provide users both HD video and excellent audio quality. The video camera is Skype-certified. The N1 lets users broadcast video in 720p and has an auto-focusing, wide-angle lens.

Cloud Engines

Company: Cloud Engines

Tech Sector: Consumer Electronics, Cloud Computing

Key Product: Pogoplug

The Lowdown: Founded in 2007 by experienced entrepreneurs from the digital media and security industries, San Francisco-based Cloud Engines aims to change the way personal content is stored and distributed over the Internet. The startup’s Pogoplug is a device that connects up to four external hard drives to the Internet, enabling consumers or businesses to securely access and share all of their content -- files, photos and video -- from any Web browser or Web-enabled mobile device with no additional monthly fees.

PerfeITo Software Solutions

Company: PerfeITo Software Solutions

Tech Sector: Services

Key Product: Process Solutions

The Lowdown: PerfeITo Software Solutions provides customized business process and knowledge process solutions. The Tamilnadu, India-based company looks to differentiate itself by tailoring its services for each specific client through an optimized methodology that sources appropriate talent and training.

Founded in January 2008, PerfeITo offers resources in application development, including application architecture and design, application migration and platform transition services, as well as solutions in traditional ERP, CRM and BI solutions, including Oracle PeopleSoft, SAP, Microsoft, Business Objects and more, according to the company’s Web site.

’With the first boom of process outsourcing now behind us, we've [learned] lessons along the way, identifying challenges arising from solutions put together too hastily and those from solutions that try to fit the same square peg into different round holes,’ according to the company’s Web site.

BBS Technologies

Company: BBS Technologies

Tech Sector: Software

Key Product: Idera/R1Soft

The Lowdown: BBS Technologies was founded in 2004 with the expectation that Windows and Linux systems management software would play a critical role in the data centers of the future. As it turns out, that was a pretty shrewd assumption.

BBS Technologies is the parent company of Idera, a Microsoft partner and developer of management tools for SQL Server, SharePoint and PowerShell. In 2007, BBS acquired R1Soft, developer of continuous data protection tools for Windows and Linux, and decided to keep that brand name because of its well-established identity within its customer base, according to Rick Pleczko, president and CEO of BBS Technologies, based in Houston.

BBS Technologies currently does about 30 percent of its business through the channel. That figure is growing, however, as the company expands its business into Linux and the hosted service provider space, which often relies on the LAMP stack to develop and deliver apps, says Pleczko.

BBS Technologies has around 160 employees and does about $30 million in annual revenue. Pleczko sees "significant opportunities" around Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform-as-a-service that launched as a paid service in February.

"Even if you have apps in the cloud, you still need to make sure they're secure, and we see this as an extension of our market," he said.

Scale Computing

Company: Scale Computing

Tech Sector: Storage

Key Product: Scale Computing StorageNodes Clustered Storage Solutions

The Lowdown: Indianapolis-based Scale Computing, (CEO Jeff Ready shown at left), was founded in 2006 when a group of engineers built a supercomputer using Intel processors but couldn't find affordable, scalable storage to go with the server. What they did find, however, was a lot of midrange companies who wanted to buy scalable storage. So the supercomputer nodes were turned into storage nodes using the company's Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology which lets customers scale to multiple petabytes of capacity, 1 TB at a time.

Nimbula

Company: Nimbula

Tech Sector: Cloud Computing/Virtualization

Key Product: Nimbula Director

The Lowdown: Officially launched in 2010 by a pair of former Amazon techies (Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon), who were instrumental in building out Amazon's widely popular Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing offering, Nimbula is looking to change the way public and private clouds operate. Nimbula Director is the company's "cloud operating system" which Nimbula said takes the scalability, agility and efficiency of services like Amazon EC2 and puts them in a private cloud infrastructure while also giving companies the ability to customize and control their infrastructure.

The Nimbula Director cloud OS is aimed at the enterprise, with channel offerings to come, and lets users specify which applications they want running in either public or private clouds and select attributes around them. Nimbula Director installs on bare metal services and can manage various hypervisors and operating systems, including Xen and KVM. Nimbula Director will be formally launched in the fall and Nimbula is actively looking for partners.

Ringio

Company: Ringio

Tech Sector: Networking

Key Product: Ringio Rich Calling

The Lowdown: Call it a virtual PBX that thinks small is beautiful: Ringio's Rich Calling is a SaaS-based call center platform targeted directly at those small- and mid-sized businesses craving enterprise functionality and sophistication at SMB price points. The details of calls appear to users either on desktop clients or through a mobile application for Android devices, which Ringio debuted during its official unveiling in late April. (The company, based in Herndon, Va., was itself founded in April 2009 by a trio of longtime SaaS and telephony executives, with the help of angel investors.)

According to Ringio, set-up takes less than a minute to download and 10 minutes to configure. No additional hardware or software is required. The software can sync with Google Contacts -- future versions will be able to integrate with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based platforms -- and it includes plenty of traditional and advanced call center functions.

Pricing for Ringio Rich Calling, which comes as a download from Ringio's site and uses a client compatible with PC, Mac or Linux environments, begins at $99 a month for four users, with additional users at $25 a seat. Ringio is also offering a "white box" deployment for partners to use in private-label services.

SandForce

Company: SandForce

Tech Sector: Storage

Key Product: SandForce SF-SSD Processor Family

The Lowdown: Some startups have bigger hurdles to overcome than others. Take SandForce, for example; the company was launched in 2006 and had the unenviable task of building a business around fab-less processors. But SandForce isn’t just another microchip company. The Saratoga, Calif.-based company specializes in making solid state drive (SSD) processors that use standard flash memory in enterprise-level storage environments. SandForce’s DuraClass technology enhances flash memory by extending the life and reliability of the SSD along with increasing read/write performance (30K IOPS and 260MB/s). SandForce recently announced a record performance benchmark on IBM Power7 systems, reaching 150,000 transactions per minute per CPU core on the TPC-C Online Transaction Processing benchmark.

DeskCenter USA

Company: DeskCenter USA Inc.

Tech Sector: Software

Key Product: DeskCenter Management Suite

The Lowdown: Administering desktop and mobile computers is one of the most time-consuming chores IT managers face -- a task not made any easier by the fact that the desktop management tool market is fragmented with hundreds of incompatible products. DeskCenter USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Leipzig, Germany-based DeskCenter Solutions AG (founded in 2007), offers a comprehensive package of 15 tools for managing physical and virtual desktop and client devices and the software running on them. Based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system and SQL Server database, DeskCenter Management Suite includes tools for hardware and software asset and license management, power management, managing application and patch deployment, and help desk and service scheduling -- all through a single dashboard interface.

While Long Beach, N.Y.-based DeskCenter already lists a number of major corporations as customers, including Lufthansa, Volkswagen and Honeywell, the company is also pitching its software to SMBs with limited IT staff as a way to cut costs and boost IT productivity. Pricing for the DeskCenter’s software begins at under $3,000 for 25 desktops, and the vendor estimated in March that it had 850 customers with 250,000 licenses worldwide. DeskCenter is also making a pitch to the channel, debuting a partner program in March to recruit VARs, managed service providers, Internet service providers and consultants.

AlertBoot

Company: AlertBoot

Tech Sector: Security

Key Product: AlertBoot Full Disk Encryption

The Lowdown: Based in Las Vegas, AlertBoot offers comprehensive, customizable full disk encryption, USB drive encryption and a comprehensive suite of disk security solutions as a centralized, managed service for companies of all sizes. Specifically, AlertBoot is a Web-based suite of data security tools built on the Sophos Safeguard Enterprise encryption platform, designed for individuals and organizations that need cost-effective, scalable disk encryption and laptop data security. The company, which was founded in 2007, prides itself on making disk encryption software easy to manage while eliminating overhead IT costs associated with implementing and maintaining "in-house" data encryption solutions.