Last Week, the annual "Under the Radar" conference took place in Mountain View, CA. This event is part of the Silicon Valley culture and has probably no equivalent anywhere else in the world. It gathers dozens of Venture Capitalist firms who come here to listen to the top 50 most promising startups as well as the start ups from the previous here which "graduated" and are making an impact on the marketplace. Here are a few companies that were invited at the event in the past 3 years.
The 2009 winners of the "Best in Show" category are CloudKick and Zuora. CloudKick is a Cloud Management Platform that aims at avoiding platform lock-in. They offer a common API to different Cloud Platforms. They presented their "CloudShift" product which showed how a virtual machine could be migrated in minutes from Amazon Web Services to SliceHost and PRGMR. Zuora is a Cloud Billing Platform. Both companies are typical startups from the Silicon Valley. CloudKick was created 3 months ago by 3 people and with just $20k of capital, while Zuora was backed by major players of the Silicon Valley and after only twelve months features a long list of customers.
Eucalyptus - An open source platform that allows you to build an on-premise cloud and transparently expand it with off-premise clouds such as Amazon Web Services.
Tapin - A Cloud-based Operations and Management platform that can manage both Cloud and on-premise systems
Zuora - A Cloud Billing and Metering plaform
Heroku - A solution for simplifying the deployment of arbitrarily complex Ruby applications. Over 25,000 unique Ruby applications have been deployed on Heroku to date.
There were seven categories:
- Cloud Platforms
- Cloud Management
- Storage Infrastructure
- Web Services
- Applications
- Development Platforms
- Data Management
One of the judges, Maha Ibrahim, gave hints that the situation is still fluid and Cloud Computing could still go in many directions over the next couple of years, while other judges indicated that "Cloud Computing is all about operations".