5 Cloudiest Cloud Startups From Cloud Connect 2011

Cloud Rules!

Cloud Connect 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, played host to more than 70 vendors showcasing cloud software, cloud apps, cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure and anything and everything cloud. But some vendors -- the smart ones, if you ask us -- put the cloud where it counts, in their name.

We prowled the Cloud Connect show floor this week to find the "cloudiest" cloud startups: The young cloud companies with the cloudiest names. Here we take a look at five of them.

Cloud Cruiser

Founded in 2010, Cloud Cruiser, Roseville, Calif., is a venture-backed company that delivers cost optimization offerings for enterprise cloud. The company officially launched earlier this month and at Cloud Connect showcased its Cloud Optimizer product, which a SaaS offering that optimizes costs across legacy, private, hybrid and public clouds via transparency, benchmarking, next-generation chargebacks and business intelligence.

CloudSoft

UK-based CloudSoft took to the Cloud Connect show floor to highlight its Monterey software, a SaaS play that the company claims makes it easy to scale and distribute high performance transactional apps across machines, geographies and clouds.

CloudSoft was founded in 2008.

Oxygen Cloud

Oxygen Cloud prides itself on reinventing enterprise file storage. At Cloud Connect, the young company showed off its Cloud File System, a cloud file access and management play that unifies users, content and devices within a company into a single view of all files. The company, based in Newark, Calif. and founded in 2010, enables users to share files and collaborate while IT maintains control over data and enforces storage and security policies.

CloudSwitch

Founded in 2008, CloudSwitch bills itself as the enterprise gateway to the cloud. Its software appliance lets enterprises run applications in the right cloud computing environment securely and without changes, while keeping applications tightly integrated with data center tools and policies. CloudSwitch, Burlington, Mass., enables apps to be moved between cloud environments and back to the data center.

Electric Cloud

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Electric Cloud isn't a startup, per se, but at Cloud Connect the private development cloud company showed off how it bridges the gap between physical and virtual IT environments and development processes and tools to create development clouds. Electric Cloud, founded in 2002, showcased its products that speed time to market, boost developer productivity and improve software quality via self-service tools for management and reporting.