25 Emerging Vendors You Need To Know About
The Ones To Watch
The CRN 2016 Emerging Vendors list has more than 100 companies. They are here because they have developed groundbreaking technology, are challenging established leaders in specific segments of the IT industry, have visionary leadership – or some combination of those and other characteristics.
Here, we present 25 startups that we think the channel should especially be aware of, either because of the innovative technologies they offer, their devotion to the channel or their potential to remake the IT space in which they compete. Some have been around for a few years (2010 was the cutoff founding date to make the list) and are already upsetting the status quo, while others are just a year or two out of the gate and barely on anyone's radar -- but should be.
The complete CRN Emerging Vendors list can be found at CRN.com. We'll also post slideshows with select companies in specific technology categories including security, storage and big data/business analytics.
AppFormix
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Sumeet Singh
Founded: 2013
AppFormix delivers a cloud service optimization platform that targets enterprise DevOps teams. With real-time analytics, capacity planning and orchestration tooling, AppFormix software gives cloud operators and application developers a shared dashboard to understand performance across the entire cloud stack for hybrid, private, and public enterprise clouds.
AtScale
San Mateo, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Dave Mariani
Founded: 2013
AtScale bridges the gap between business users, their favorite BI tools and their underlying data in Hadoop. AtScale's founders launched the company based on their personal experiences building BI solutions on Hadoop at Yahoo and Klout. AtScale works with customers across financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and other industries to make BI work on Hadoop.
Avi Networks
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Amit Pandey
Founded: 2012
The Avi Vantage Platform delivers automated application services including load balancing, application analytics, predictive auto-scaling and security for on-premise or public cloud applications. The platform is built on software-defined principles, runs on commodity x86 servers, virtual machines or containers, and matches the automation and self-service goals of modern enterprises.
Bastille Networks
Atlanta
Top Executive: CEO Chris Risley
Founded: 2014
Bastille provides an Internet of Things security system for the enterprise. The technology helps enterprise security teams protect corporate airspace by scanning the entire radio frequency (RF) spectrum between 60MHz and 6GHz, providing visibility into devices that operate on more than 100 distinct protocols.
Big Switch Networks
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Douglas Murray
Founded: 2010
Big Switch Networks brings hyperscale-inspired data center networking technologies to a mainstream data center audience. The company takes three hyperscale technologies -- OEM/ODM bare metal and open Ethernet switch hardware, SDN control software and core-and-pod data center designs -- and leverages them in fit-for-purpose products for use by enterprises, cloud providers and service providers.
Cato Networks
Tel Aviv, Israel
Top Executive: Shlomo Kramer
Founded: 2015
Cato has developed a Network Security as a Service (NSaaS) platform that the company says is changing the way network security is delivered and managed for distributed, cloud-centric and mobile-first enterprises.
Cazena
Waltham, Mass.
Top Executive: Prat Moghe
Founded: 2014
Cazena offers a "big data as a service" platform that can be integrated into enterprise IT infrastructures. The service provides cloud data marts and data lakes on demand. They're connected to existing data flows and IT processes so users can access data immediately without changing how they work or waiting for a massive business analytics project.
Cohesity
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Mohit Aron
Founded: 2013
Cohesity delivers a hyper-converged secondary storage platform for consolidating backup, test and development, file services and analytic data onto an infinitely scalable, intelligent data platform that spans both on-premise data centers and the cloud. With Cohesity, IT organizations can simplify their storage environments and attain greater visibility into their data assets.
Cloud4Wi
San Francisco
Top Executive: CEO Andrea Calcagno
Founded: 2013
Cloud4Wi offers its Volare services platform for advanced guest Wi-Fi. With Volare, large retail and restaurant chains, as well as shopping malls, can build their brands by leveraging their existing Wi-Fi networks to provide superior on-site mobile experiences while gaining valuable customer insights.
CloudJumper
Garner, N.C.
Top Executive: President John Helms
Founded: 2016
CloudJumper is a workspace as a service (WaaS) platform innovator for the agile business. CloudJumper's nWorkSpace allows for the delivery of desktops, applications and complete workspaces that include storage through the channel to end customers. The fully packaged platform is unique in the industry for its simple, fast delivery.
Confluent
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Jay Kreps
Founded: 2014
Founded by the creators of the open-source Apache Kafka messaging software, Confluent enables organizations to harness business value from streaming data. The Confluent Platform manages stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides businesses in industries like retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services and online social networking with a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline.
Contrast Security
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Alan Naumann
Founded: 2013
Contrast Security's cybersecurity product unifies vulnerability detection and attack protection. The application security software quickly and accurately stops hackers from stealing data via applications, employing patented, deep-security instrumentation to strengthen applications in development, defending them in production, and securing them throughout the application lifecycle.
Cybereason
Boston
Top Executive: CEO Lior Div
Founded: 2012
The Cybereason Detection and Response Platform leverages big data, behavioral analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to uncover, in real-time, complex cyberattacks that are designed to evade traditional defenses. The technology automates the investigation process and connects isolated malicious events. The platform is available as an on-premise solution or a cloud-based service.
Cylance
Irvine, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Stuart McClure
Founded: 2012
Cylance offers a preventive cybersecurity solution that stops advanced threats and malware at the most vulnerable point, the endpoint, by applying a revolutionary artificial intelligence approach in the Cylance endpoint security solution, CylancePROTECT.
Datera
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Marc Fleischmann
Founded: 2013
Datera brings hyper-scale operations and economics to private and public clouds. Datera's unique architecture understands application intent, learns infrastructure capabilities, and continuously optimizes the underlying storage composition. The result is a low-latency, high-performance and high-density block storage solution that's economical.
Elastifile
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Amir Aharoni
Founded: 2013
Elastifile is pioneering the next generation of software-defined storage (SDS) technology. The company's flexible, hardware-agnostic SDS architecture intelligently optimizes storage performance and efficiency, eliminating the need for traditional, costly alternatives. Elastifile enables enterprise applications to cost-effectively and seamlessly scale, while providing the reliability and manageability that IT administrators require.
Illusive Networks
New York
Top Executive: CEO Shlomo Touboul
Founded: 2014
Illusive Networks develops a deception-based cybersecurity system with its patent-pending Deceptions Everywhere technology that neutralizes targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats by creating a deceptive layer across the entire network. By providing an endless source of false information, Illusive Networks disrupts and detects breaches with real-time forensics without disruption to businesses.
IndependenceIT
Allentown, Pa.
Top Executive: CEO Seth Bostock
Founded: 2012
IndependenceIT provides a workspace automation software platform that allows IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver desktop environments, workspaces, applications and data from any cloud infrastructure to users anywhere, on any device. The company's Cloud Workspace Suite combines application, end-user and infrastructure management into a seamless, easy-to-manage platform.
Midokura
San Francisco
Top Executive: CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu
Founded: 2010
Midokura provides a software-based, highly distributed network virtualization system that allows enterprises and service providers to build, run and manage virtual networks with increased control and agility. Using industry standards and leveraging existing physical infrastructure, the technology reduces costs and improves the agility, security and performance of networks.
SafeBreach
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Guy Bejerano
Founded: 2014
SafeBreach is a pioneer in the emerging category of continuous security validation. The company's platform provides a "hacker's view" of an enterprise's security posture for continuous security assessment. SafeBreach automatically executes breach methods with its extensive and growing Hacker's Playbook of research and real-world investigative data.
Tempered Networks
Seattle
Top Executive: CEO Jeff Hussey
Founded: 2014
Tempered Networks delivers a new approach to securing hybrid enterprise networks. The company's Identity-Defined Networking Fabric cloaks an organization's fluid and porous perimeter with baked-in security, micro-segmentation, and centralized automated orchestration to eliminate manual errors, cut operating expenses, and ensure enterprise scale.
Teridion
San Francisco
Top Executive: CEO Elad Rave
Founded: 2013
Teridion is redefining dynamic content delivery by bringing high-performance connectivity over the Internet between cloud-based content and application providers and their customers. Teridion's Global Cloud Network (GCN), a global routed overlay network leveraging cloud-optimized routing, offers throughput that is, on average, 20 times faster than current Internet speeds.
Versa Networks
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Kumar Mehta
Founded: 2012
Versa Networks is an innovative vendor in the software defined-WAN and virtualized network functions (VNF) markets. The company's systems enable service providers and large enterprises to transform WANs and branch networks to achieve business advantages. Versa's carrier-grade VNF software provides agility, cost savings and flexibility versus traditional network hardware.
Workato
Cupertino, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Vijay Tella
Founded: 2013
Workato develops an enterprise-class platform that enables businesses to integrate cloud and on-premise business applications in an easy, self-service manner. With Workato, even non-technical users can seamlessly integrate over 150 business applications and automate business processes and tasks with no coding.
ZeroStack
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Ajay Gulati
Founded: 2014
ZeroStack is a one-stop shop for IT infrastructure that helps businesses transition to hybrid cloud systems. The ZeroStack Cloud Appliance can be deployed in minutes, either on premise or in a co-located facility, offering private infrastructure regardless of location. ZeroStack is also designed to provide application portability across clouds.