The 20 Coolest Cloud Software Companies Of The 2020 Cloud 100
Here are 20 cloud software companies, from startups to more established companies, whose cloud software has caught our attention.
20 Coolest Cloud Software Companies
Businesses today trust the cloud for even their most mission-critical applications and the workloads they perform. Gone are the days when the cloud was seen as “OK” for CRM and marketing, but real application systems, such as core ERP and financial management, had to stay on-premises. Applications today operate in hybrid cloud/on-premises environments, if not solely in the cloud. Just about every established software vendor has adapted their products for the cloud, while startups generally skip the on-premises concept Sculaltogether.
Here are 20 cloud software companies, from startups to more established companies, whose cloud software has caught our attention.
Adobe
Shantanu Narayen, President, CEO
Adobe is a longtime leader in developing creativity and multimedia applications including Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop and Illustrator—many bundled in the popular Adobe Creative Cloud package. More recently the company has been expanding into digital marketing and digital experience management software.
Anaplan
Frank Calderoni, CEO
Anaplan develops a cloud-native planning system that connects people across an enterprise for financial, sales, marketing, supply chain, workforce and IT planning tasks. The platform uses complex scenario modeling, automated data analysis and advanced machine-learning capabilities.
Databricks
Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder, CEO
Fast-growing big data company Databricks offers its Unified Data Analytics Platform, a single cloud platform for massive-scale data engineering and collaborative data science applications. Founded by the developers of Apache Spark, the company raised $400 million in Series F financing in October, bringing its market cap to $6.2 billion.
Datadog
Olivier Pomel, Co-founder, CEO
Datadog provides a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale applications, used by developers, IT operations teams and business users. In January the company launched the Datadog Partner Network, expanding support for the company’s MSP, systems integrator, reseller and referral partners.
Domo
Josh James, Founder, CEO
Domo’s cloud-native platform creates a unified view of data spread across multiple systems within an enterprise and provides tools to visualize and analyze data using mobile devices. The company’s recently launched Domo for Amazon Web Services taps into more than 20 AWS services such as S3 storage, Redshift and Athena.
Dremio
Tomer Shiran, Founder, CEO
Dremio developed a data lake engine that makes data more accessible and helps organizations derive more value from their data. Based on Apache Arrow technology, the Dremio Data-as-a-Service platform eliminates the need to copy and move data to proprietary data warehouses or create cubes, aggregation tables or business intelligence extracts.
HubSpot
Brian Halligan, Co-founder, CEO
HubSpot provides inbound marketing and sales applications including social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization. In November HubSpot acquired startup PieSync and its technology for synchronizing current and historical customer data that’s scattered across disparate systems.
Matillion
Matthew Scullion, CEO
More businesses are moving their on-premises data warehouses to the cloud. That’s fueling demand for Matillion’s data transformation/ETL software for collecting data from operational applications and other data sources, cleaning and formatting it, and moving it into cloud data warehouse like Snowflake and AWS Redshift for analysis.
New Relic
Lew Cirne, Founder, CEO
New Relic’s application performance management software provides real-time and trending data about web application performance and end-user experience satisfaction. Other software products help businesses analyze user behavior and business transactions, generating insight about customer interactions.
Pendo
Todd Olson, Founder, CEO
The Pendo Product Cloud system is focused on driving customer adoption of a business’ software products, understanding how they use the product, improving user experience and building customer loyalty. In October the company’s market valuation hit $1 billion following a $100 million funding round.
Salesforce
Marc Benioff, Keith Block, Co-CEOs
Salesforce has been the model for cloud software with its CRM, marketing and service applications. Last year the company acquired business analytics software developer Tableau for $15.7 billion: The big idea is that combining customer-facing applications with business analytics will create a major force in digital transformation.
SAP
Christian Klein, Jennifer Morgan, Co-CEOs
Business application giant SAP has been transitioning to cloud software with recurring revenue (software subscriptions and support services) expected to account for 70 percent to 75 percent of 2020 sales. A major focus has been integrating and leveraging the Qualtrics experience management applications the company acquired in 2019 for $8 billion.
ServiceNow
Bill McDermott, CEO
ServiceNow bills itself as “the workflow company,” providing IT service management and IT operations management through its cloud-based platform and tools. In November former SAP CEO Bill McDermott took over as ServiceNow CEO and Gina Mastantuono was named CFO.
Slack
Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder, CEO
Slack operates its namesake cloud-based collaboration hub/instant messaging system that’s become hugely popular as an alternative to email. Slack organizes conversations in shared channels, rather than a single in-box. In addition to its enterprise edition, Slack comes in editions specifically designed for teams in engineering, finance, sales and other disciplines.
Snowflake
Frank Slootman, CEO
Despite competing with cloud giants like AWS and Google, cloud data warehouse provider Snowflake has experienced explosive growth since its 2012 founding. The company’s value proposition: Cloud data warehouses are more flexible than on-premises data warehouses, which are too complex and too expensive to build and operate.
Splunk
Doug Merritt, CEO
Offering what it calls the “Data-to-Everything” platform, Splunk’s software collects machine-generated data for a wide range of applications including security, IT system and application management, AIOps and business analytics. In October Splunk acquired SignalFx, a developer of cloud infrastructure monitoring and metrics software.
Workday
Aneel Bhusri, Co-founder, CEO
Workday’s core business is its widely adopted cloud-based human resources management applications. But the company is making a big push into the broader ERP arena with financial management and planning applications: Workday says annual sales of its financial management applications are growing at more than 50 percent.
ZenDesk
Mikkel Svane, Founder, CEO
ZenDesk has expanded beyond its help desk application roots to offer a comprehensive line of CRM software for support, sales and customer engagement. In October the company launched a new partner program, including a comprehensive certification program and incentives, to help partners build a customer experience practice.
Zoho
Sridhar Vembu, Founder, CEO
Zoho is known for its Software-as-a-Service CRM applications that compete with Salesforce and personal productivity apps that provide an alternative to Microsoft Office. More recently the company has expanded with applications for financial management, help desk, human resources management, email and collaboration, and more—all available in a single integrated suite.
Zuora
Tien Tzuo, Founder, CEO
Zuora markets a subscription management platform and applications that help companies launch, manage and transform their subscription business. It’s hard to argue with the company’s vision that we have reached “the end of ownership” and are entering the age of the subscription economy.