10 Hot Emerging Vendors For May 2012

The Beat Goes On

Here is the latest crop of brash, young companies ready to make their mark on the technology landscape.

From cloud computing to Web analytics, and from storage to security, these emerging companies merit attention.

Continue on and find out which of these 10 hot new vendors you think will make a mark.

FireHost

Company: FireHost
Tech Sector: Cloud Computing
Key Product: Secure Cloud Hosting


FireHost offers a secure cloud hosting platform, which includes its Secure Cloud Server, PCI- and HIPPA-compliant hosting, and load balancing services.

The Dallas, Texas-based company has received $12 million in venture funding, and on March 14 it opened a data center for secure cloud hosting in Phoenix, Ariz., to complement centers in Dallas and London.

Its services are focused thus far on the worldwide eCommerce, SaaS, healthcare IT and security markets.

Zerto

Company: Zerto
Tech Sector: Disaster Recovery
Key Product: Zerto Virtual Replication 2.0


Zerto offers enterprise-level disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

Zerto Virtual Replication, its flagship, hypervisor-based product, is designed for tier-one applications. It integrates cloud and enterprise business continuity and disaster recovery and replaces traditional array-based backup and recovery systems not developed for virtual environments.

Zerto is headquartered in Herzelia, Israel, and in Boston, Mass., and is funded by U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Pure Storage

Company: Pure Storage
Tech Sector: Storage
Key Product: Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0


Pure Storage, a developer of storage arrays based on Flash memory technology instead of hard drives, introduced general availability of its arrays, which it says are priced competitively with traditional hard drive-based arrays.

The Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0 is a full-fledged primary storage array. It features both in-line and global data deduplication in combination with a non-volatile RAM (NV-RAM) cache that runs continuously, the company said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Pure Storage in August came out of stealth mode with funding of $55 million, including a stake held by Samsung, one of the world's largest providers of Flash memory chips.

CipherCloud

Company: CipherCloud
Tech Sector: Cloud Security
Key Product: CipherCloud Gateway 2.0


CipherCloud is a provider of cloud encryption gateways for public and private clouds.

The gateway acts as a platform to secure user data for applications, including Salesforce.com, Gmail, Chatter and Amazon Web Services. The gateway incorporates security controls, including tokenization, activity monitoring and malware detection.

In March, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said it joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization promoting cloud security best practices.

InkTank

Company: InTank
Tech Sector: Storage
Key Product: Ceph


Startup InkTank earlier this month came out of stealth mode to provide enterprise-level support for customers looking to use the open-source Ceph scalable distributed storage system to build storage infrastructures.

Los Angeles, Calif.-based InkTank offers support, professional services and certification for Ceph, which is in the Linux kernel. The company is working with a variety of indirect channels.

Ceph is a storage technology that provides object, block and file storage in a single file system for unified storage, and was developed as a Ph.D. project by Sage Weil, founder of InkTank, to solve issues related to scaling metadata in high-performance computing applications.

ITADSecurity

Company: ITADSecurity
Tech Sector: Security
Key Product: Watchdog


Dover, Mass.-based security startup ITADSecurity has developed Watchdog, a physical security tool that monitors the network, identifying data-bearing devices and extracting information needed to conduct risk management analysis.

The company said that data breaches can result when hard drives containing key company information are lost or stolen.

ITADSecurity recently received $75,000 in funding.

iSpecimen

Company: iSpecimen
Tech Sector: Healthcare
Key Product: iSpecimen


iSpecimen’s software links specimens at hospitals and laboratories with electronic medical records to create customized, annotated specimens for researchers.

The company’s technology is made up of three features: Patient Cohort Selection, Medical and Lab Records Search, and Biospecimen Processing and Delivery.

The Newton, Mass.-based company’s solution complies with HIPPA, the Common Rule, OHRP and FDA regulations.

KleerMail

Company: KleerMail
Tech Sector: Software
Key Product: KleerMail


KleerMail, of Boston, Mass., allows users to manage direct mail campaigns from an automated platform.

The product lets teams review budgets and market data as well as collaborate on projects. It also lowers direct mail costs and speeds time-to-market.

Mixpanel

Company: Mixpanel
Tech Sector: Web Analytics
Key Product: Flow


Mixpanel, of San Francisco, Calif., offers Web and mobile analytics software. Its data visualization product, Flow, gives website operators data about their traffic.

The company recently received $10 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, including Max Levchin, founder of Paypal, and Marc Benioff, founder of Salesfroce.com.

Embrane

Company: Embrane
Tech Sector: Cloud Computing
Key Product: heleos


Embrane provides virtualized network services for the cloud. Its heleos distributed software platform manages virtual network services such as WAN optimization, server load balancing and firewalls/VPNs.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company says heleos enables the on-demand configuration, procurement and provisioning of network services.

The company said heleos will support Citrix XenServer version 6.0.

Embrane was founded by former Cisco executives Dante Malagrinò, the company's president and CEO, and Marco Di Benedetto, the company’s CTO.

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