I had the pleasure to attend the VMWorld user conference last week - if you have missed my takeaways you can find them here. VMworld is a gathering of all professionals and companies involved in virtualization, IaaS and PaaS - starting 6 months ago I began receiving questions during briefings (formally and informally) about whether I would attend.
[I kept the sequence in alphabetical order - there is no preference or ranking of vendors here!].
AppEnsure was founded with the idea to bring an end to perennial finger pointing that happens between different functions of technical support, when a performance problem occurs, while the business side is in agony. I met with the founders that went the hard way by looking at the network packet traffic - by inspecting the packets and recording normal application performance and then being aware of issues coming up. Sounds pretty hard but with both founders coming from a networking background they seem to know what they are doing and have mastered a perennial problem for the business users.
Atlantis computing brings a solution to the usually sluggish VDI situation - by moving the whole desktop and storage into server side RAM. Obviously a huge performance boost - that brings the VDI experience ahead of even very fast SSDs - and the cost seems to be controlled by amongst others by compression and in-line de-duplication of requests across the clients. Atlantis claims that the cost of a virtualized PC is below of that of a real PC - while offering better performance. Give their impressive list of customers they are clearly on to something - making usually performance challenged VDI deployments scale is an obvious strong point.
CloudPhysics, founded amongst other by two VMware alumni, makes reporting and simulating load in a VMware running data center easier. Strong points are the focus on usability - it has to work in 60 seconds and show a benefit - said founder and CTO Irfan Ahmad and the crowd sourcing or community based building of cards - the way CloudPhysics stores and display system information. This should be a powerful combination that will the company drive adoption. If CloudPhysics manages now to advise the IT community on which system loads could when be moved to the public cloud - there is a home run potential here.
CloudVelocity makes it easy to move multi tier apps to the public cloud - without need for modification. Sound like really hard if not impossible to do - but with the founding teams is ex Neopath and with that has significant expertise in file exploration and transfer. Right now the company focusses on Disaster Recovery - and more interesting - Cloud Cloning and Migration. The company has the experience and guts to potentially create one of the first migration products between private cloud and public cloud - and there to multiple providers. The strong point is the non invasive way to just read and transfer files to different cloud environments.
Next up was iland - a relatively small cloud infrastructure provider that nonetheless has been able to play with the big guys around development and test cloud offerings, disaster recovery and VMware related services between private and public cloud. The strong point is the companies expertise with VMware and smart product and service development around the needs of the ecosystem. It's encouraging to see dynamic players enriching the numbers of options companies have to build out their cloud infrastructure and that these players can chart a successful course through the market.
Not really a startup anymore Jamcracker addresses the need to offer a framework and platform to vendors that want to sell cloud applications and services into their respective ecosystems. And while large public cloud providers will create their own platforms and stores, Jamcracker is a viable option for telecom providers, IT Distributors and large end users, as e.g. public institutions. As such Jamcracker plays a critical role for the adoption of web services in different industries, the strong point being an integrated platform and significant complexity reduction for the operator.
Teradici plays in the VDI space and own the PCoIP protocol that allows the host side compression of video images and its delivery to non PC clients. Teradici technology features heavily in VMware's horizon VDI product but the company works also outside the VMware ecosystem. Teradici's strongpointt is a turnkey solution around their PCoIP protocol starting with hostside hardware acceleration, over optimized network usage all the way to enable VDI clients. It's good to see a system play around a strong protocol - you don't see these often these days anymore - but in a performance critical space like VDI they have room to go.
Zerigo is part of the larger 8x8 Inc and focuses on bringing the Destop as a service (DAAS) to the SMB companies. The company exploits some of the weaknesses in scaling, licensing and usability that the VMware products have, that focus on the larger customers. Strong points are the understanding of the SMB market and creating smart software add-ons that create a simpler and easier to use user experience.