Emerging Vendors 2012: Software Vendors

Rising Software Stars

CRN's annual Emerging Vendors examines the hottest tech startups in multiple disciplines throughout the technology industry. But, it's not all about unique offers and reliable services with these guys. The vendors on this list know the value of a good partnership and have a serious commitment to the channel. Innovating in every facet of the software space, from big data to CRM software to cloud software, let's take a look at the hottest tech startups in software from the Emerging Vendors list for 2012.

Alpine Data Labs

San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Tom Ryan

Extracting value from big data can be a huge pain point for many companies. Alpine Data Labs has developed the Alpine Miner in-database analytics tool with "modeling to scoring" capabilities that the company says offers a breakthrough in big data predictive analytics. Alpine Miner, according to Alpine Data Labs, is designed for business users as well as hardcore data analysts and is more cost-effective than other predictive analysis systems. Founded in early 2010 and incubated inside Greenplum, the business intelligence and data warehouse software company EMC acquired last year, Alpine Data was spun off and recently raised $7.5 million in venture funding.

Appcelerator

Mountain View, Calif.

CEO: Jeff Haynie

Appcelerator provides development tools and services that help Web developers build applications once and deploy them on several mobile devices, tablets and desktop computers based on disparate architectures. Appcelerator's flagship product, Appcelerator Titanium, is a mobile cloud platform that enables fully native, cross-platform mobile app and HTML5 Web development from a single codebase.

Bizroof

San Francisco, Calif.

CEO: Jason Smith

Bizroof developed a collaborative CRM and events scheduling system, which it touts as the best way to store, organize and share info collected from customer interactions. The apps also provide sales and cash flow analysis for tracking opportunities, deals and quotes.

Centrix Software

Framingham, Mass.

CEO: Lisa Hammond

Centrix Software provides Centrix WorkSpace analytics and service delivery solutions for end-user computing, which enables partners and customers to gain more insight via out-of-the-box reports. The analysis and data can be used to examine how IT is used and consumed, optimize investments for cost savings and efficiencies, and plan and prepare for cloud computing and virtualization. According to the company, Centrix WorkSpace is both Citrix Ready and VMware Ready.

Circonus

Columbia, Md.

CEO: Theo Schlossnagle

Circonus offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) that it bills as "monitoring-as-a-service," or MaaS, which monitors networks, systems and applications to offer real-time trending and visualization of what's occurring in an IT environment. Circonus also extends its monitoring capabilities into marketing, finance and business operations to give a view of the entire business.

ClearSlide

San Francisco, Calif.

CEO: Al Lieb

ClearSlide nabbed $11 million in Series A funding in 2011 to continue to build around its cloud-based business communications platform. Led by Evite co-founder Al Lieb, CEO, and seasoned sales executive Jim Benton, COO, the company focuses on helping sales teams close business. First, sales teams upload their sales collateral into ClearSlide, including presentations, PDFs, videos, interactive Web pages and other information. Sales can now deliver this content via different communication methods, including phone calls, emails and in-person presentations. ClearSlide, founded in 2009, also collects analytics on how sales teams and customers interact with the content, helping sales reps know how to focus their time and enabling management to gain better insight into their team's activities.

CompleteXRM

Salt Lake City, Utah

CEO: Keith Norris

CompleteXRM develops what it calls "Enterprise 2.0 CRM" apps for SMBs. Built on a Java-based, service-oriented architecture model, the Enterprise 2.0 CRM apps can be easily customized and extended for the specific needs of any industry.

Custora

Brooklyn, N.Y.

CEO: Corey Pierson

Custora offers on-demand e-marketing and predictive analysis applications that businesses use to identify customers and keep them engaged. The applications help improve customer retention by analyzing transaction patterns to figure out how customers behave and predict their buying behavior as much as two years out -- what Custora calls "customer lifetime value." The system can help, say, an online retailer re-engage with a customer that's been idle using targeted promotions. It can also help e-tailers and subscription services allocate ad spending. Custora, founded in 2010 and appeared live in late February, touts itself as a low-cost alternative to expensive e-marketing and predictive analysis apps. Backed by startup funder Y Combinator, Custora has already lined up about a dozen customers including Foodzie, Get Satisfaction, Kobo and Scribd.

Datameer

San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Stefan Groschupf

The amount of data generated and stored by businesses is doubling every three years. Throw in the fact that data is a mix of structured and unstructured information, often scattered across disparate IT systems, and you have a serious challenge for any company with a business intelligence project. The Datameer Analytics Solution from startup Datameer, founded in 2009, combines Apache Hadoop with a spreadsheet interface that helps business users run analytics against very large data sets -- for structured and unstructured data from multiple sources -- with no programming. While analyzing big data used to be a big-company problem, Datameer makes a compelling point: Small and midsize companies now face similar challenges given that the low cost of commodity storage makes collecting huge volumes of data economically feasible.

DeskCenter USA

Long Beach, N.Y.

CEO: Hans J Kaemmlein

Administering PCs and mobile devices is one of the most time-consuming chores IT managers face -- a task not made any easier by the fact that the desktop management tool market is fragmented with hundreds of incompatible products. Founded in 2007, DeskCenter USA offers the DeskCenter Management Suite, a solution that optimizes administrative tasks for both physical and virtual desktop and client devices and the software running on them.

Deskera

Sunnyvale, Calif.

Deskera develops an integrated SaaS suite of financial management and accounting, CRM, project management, HR management, training, and leave and attendance applications. The company touts the data-sharing capabilities of its products, which are targeted at SMBs.

Digital Reef

Boxborough, Mass.

CEO: Chris Risley

E-discovery software provider Digital Reef helps law firms cut costs by providing a scalable and open platform for e-discovery services and digital information governance applications.

Entando

Fort Wayne, Ind.

CEO: Walter Ambu

Etando is looking to reinvent the enterprise portal by introducing a lower-cost, higher-quality solution to the market. Etando's Enterprise Portal consolidates multiple types of data into a single interface to provide quick access to critical resources from a single launching point.

FastTrack Software AsP

Klarup, Denmark

CEO: Justin Sway

FastTrack's Scripting Host provides network administrators with a software solution that alleviates administration headaches through fast and powerful scripts.

Fluxx

San Francisco, Calif.

Founder: Jason Ricci

Fluxx, which was founded in 2011, is looking to unify your data. Fluxx's business management platform aggregates all company data together into a single, unified interface in real-time, the company claims. The cloud-based service lets users compile applications and specific data into a dashboard that showcases only the data they seek. Fluxx can be run as a standalone platform or in conjunction with third-party businesses and social applications including Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, LinkedIn and more. Right now, Fluxx is only available in a private beta.

GloStream

Minneapolis, Minn.

CEO: Mike Sappington

Plenty of healthcare information systems and medical software are compatible with Microsoft tools, but gloStream, which makes gloEMR, gloPM and gloSuite, claims it has the only medical practice software applications with Microsoft Office built right into them. GloStream is a 100 percent channel company with a growing partner program and has been active in touting its products in line with stimulus opportunity.

Hadapt

Cambridge, Mass.

CEO: Justin Borgman

Hadapt touts its Hadapt Adaptive Analytic Platform as combining the benefits of Hadoop and relational database management software into a single data platform. The result is a high-performance analytics system that's capable of working with both structured and unstructured data. Founded in July 2010, the company raised $9.5 million in first-round funding and debuted Hadapt 1.0 in Nov. 2011 under an "early access" program for potential customers to try out. The software, according to the company, offers "enormous performance improvements" over Hadoop and its Hive data warehousing technology. The software is available in cloud and enterprise versions. They run on all major distributions of Hadoop including Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.

Hortonworks

Sunnyvale, Calif.

CEO: Rob Bearden

Founded a little over a year ago, Hortonworks debuted release 1.0 of its Hortonworks Data Platform in June. Built on Hadoop and other open-source software from the Apache Software Foundation, the Hortonworks Data Platform adds other tools and technologies that make it easy for businesses to implement a big data system and develop applications for managing and analyzing all that information. Hortonworks is a spin-off of Yahoo's Hadoop engineering team. The company is widely seen as the chief competitor to the more established Cloudera, which offers its own Hadoop distribution. The company's name comes from the Dr. Seuss book "Horton Hears a Who," in keeping with the Hadoop elephant theme.

HStreaming

Chicago, Ill.

CEO: Jana Uhlig

While Hadoop may be the de facto engine for processing large amounts of data, it's largely used for batch processing. Analyzing data in real time takes the value of Hadoop to a whole new level. And that's where HStreaming comes in. Founded in 2010, Chicago-based HStreaming is a scalable, continuous data analysis system built on Hadoop. It allows organizations to analyze, visualize and act upon massive amounts of continuous data -- such as a financial trading system might generate -- in real time.

IGLOO Software

Waterloo, Ontario

CEO: Dan Latendre

IGLOO Software gets the channel. A developer of social software that builds online communities for business, IGLOO enhances channel partner programs through its digital workplace offerings and innovative partner portals.

Infor

New York, N.Y.

CEO: Charles Phillips

Infor sells an expansive line of ERP, CRM, financial, supply chain, workforce and enterprise asset management software. The company has grown through numerous acquisitions, including GEAC, SSA Global and Lawson Software. Led by CEO Charles Phillips, Infor is stepping up its channel game, recently raising its restriction on its partners to sell to customers with annual sales of $100 million up to $500 million.

iSpecimen

Newton, Mass.

CEO: Christopher Ianelli

iSpecimen’s software links specimens at hospitals and laboratories with electronic medical records to create customized, annotated specimens for researchers. The company’s technology is made up of three features: Patient Cohort Selection, Medical and Lab Records Search, and Biospecimen Processing and Delivery.

Karmasphere

Cupertino, Calif.

CEO: Gail Ennis

Karmasphere is launching release 2.0 of its collaborative analytics software for extracting and analyzing data from Hadoop. The toolset lets users visually explore data to discover trends and patterns, analyze information using ad-hoc queries and then share the results with co-workers. Karmasphere has partnered with virtually all the vendors and organizations with Hadoop distributions, including the Apache Software Foundation, IBM, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services and Hortonworks.

KleerMail

Boston, Mass.

CEO: Chris Nolan

KleerMail allows users to manage direct mail campaigns from an automated platform. The product lets teams review budgets and market data as well as collaborate on projects. It also lowers direct mail costs and speeds time-to-market.

KnowledgeTree

Raleigh, N.C.

CEO: Daniel Chalef

KnowledgeTree has a unique back story: the company was founded in 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa, with the intention of building a business around open-source document management software. And by the spring of 2007, KnowledgeTree’s eponymous flagship software product reached 300,000 downloads via the open-source portal SourceForge.net. The company now has both an on-site license version of its enterprise content management software as well as a software-as-a-service version called KnowledgeTree Live.

Krawler

Pune, India

CEO: Shashank Dixit

One problem with many software-as-a-service applications is that integrating multiple on-demand applications to exchange data can be a chore. That’s an advantage of on-demand software suites, including Krawler’s Deskera, which targets small and midsize businesses with between five and 100 employees. Krawler, founded in 2006, is based in Pune, India, and is well-established there and throughout other Asian countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

Leapfactor

Miami, Fla.

CEO: Lionel Carrasco

Launched in 2010, San Francisco-based Leapfactor offers an enterprise-class mobility platform that businesses can use to make any application available to employees, customers and partners through their mobile devices. The cloud-based system integrates with back-end systems, extracts data using light XML trading mechanisms and securely delivers it to mobile devices through what the company describes as "consumer-like apps." Leapfactor also offers a suite of three micro apps: Business Alerts, which delivers important messages needed for decision making; Business Indicators, which publishes business metrics such as key performance indicators and financial data to mobile users; and Business Approvals, which extends to mobile devices workflows that require approvals and rejections.

LincWare

Rochester, N.Y.

CEO: Darren Mathis

LincWare was founded in 2007 and since that time has sharpened its LincDoc family of eForm creation and documentation automation tools. The company looks to empower businesses and municipal organizations to better serve their customers and constituents, reduce costs and better leverage bottom-line critical information.

Lucid Imagination

Redwood City, Calif.

CEO: Paul Doscher

The search and discovery market is growing at a brisk pace of 28 percent annually, with 2007 revenue of $1.8 billion, according to IDC. Lucid Imagination offers certified distributions of Lucene and Solr, commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting and value-added software extensions. The company’s website serves as a knowledge portal for the Lucene community, with information and resources to help developers build and deploy Lucene-based solutions in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

MapR Technologies

San Jose, Calif.

CEO: John Schroeder

MapR Technologies offers a distribution of Apache Hadoop, putting it in competition with Cloudera and Hortonworks, among others. But, the company, founded in June 2009, has some key advantages including a strategic alliance with EMC and $20 million raised in second-round funding in August. MapR unveiled version 1.2 of its MapR Hadoop distribution in December with new virtual machine capabilities, a high-performance native access library, Mac and Windows clients, and the ability to take advantage of MapReduce 2.0 technology.

Marketo

Dublin, Ireland

CEO: Phil Fernandez

Software maker Marketo has been making a major splash with its Revenue Performance Management solutions, tools for marketing automation and sales effectiveness that have the ability to change how marketing and sales teams work to drive increased revenue and boost business growth.

MeLLmo

San Diego, Calif.

CEO: Santiago Becerra

MeLLmo developed the Roambi mobile graphics and visualization application for accessing corporate systems, including BI systems such as SAP Business Objects, Crystal Reports, IBM Cognos and Microsoft Reporting Services.

Mixpanel

San Francisco, Calif.

CEO: Suhail Doshi

Mixpanel offers Web and mobile analytics software. Its data visualization product, Flow, gives website operators data about their traffic. The company recently received $10 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, including Max Levchin, founder of Paypal, and Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com.

Mortar Data

New York, N.Y.

CEO: K Young

Hadoop requires a fair amount of technical expertise with which to work. Mortar Data offers a cloud-based service, based on the Python programming language and the Apache Pig technology for analyzing huge data sets, which makes Hadoop accessible to a wider audience of programmers. Mortar Data emerged from stealth mode this spring with an undisclosed amount of seed funding. The company's long-range plan is to work with technology partners to bring a range of business intelligence, analytics and advanced monitoring capabilities to the Mortar Data platform.

Nimbula

Mountain View, Calif.

CEO: Chris Pinkham

The brainchild of ex- Amazoners, Nimbula calls itself a cloud OS, and its infrastructure-as-a-service software offering, Nimbula Director, was built to deliver Amazon-like services to enterprises and service providers by enabling management of on- and off-premise resources.

Omek Interactive

Bet Shemesh, Israel

CEO: Janine Kutliroff

Founded in 2006, Omek Interactive is the brainchild of husband and wife team Dr. Gershom and Janine Kutliroff. The Israeli company specializes in software that enables gesture recognition and body movement tracking and transforms users' movements into a 3-D avatar. Omek's SDK gives application developers and interface/display manufacturers the ability to add gesture recognition to their devices and platform, giving users the ability to interact with computers, televisions and other systems without physical controllers or keyboards.

Pardot

Atlanta, Geo.

CEO: David Cummings

Pardot develops the Prospect Insight B2B marketing automation software for creating, deploying and managing online marketing campaigns. Targeted at SMBs, Pardot’s on-demand software is integrated with apps from Salesforce.com, NetSuite and SugarCRM.

PerfeITo Software Solutions

Namakkal Dt, Tamilnadu

PerfeITo Software Solutions provides customized business process and knowledge process solutions. The company looks to differentiate itself by tailoring its services for each specific client through an optimized methodology that sources appropriate talent and training. Founded in January 2008, PerfeITo offers resources in application development, including application architecture and design, application migration and platform transition services, as well as solutions in traditional ERP, CRM and BI solutions, including Oracle PeopleSoft, SAP, Microsoft, Business Objects and more, according to the company’s website.

QASymphony

Dublin, Calif.

CEO: Vu Lam

QASymphony improves the help desk ticketing process with its qTrace software, a screen capture tool that incorporates intelligence that allows users to submit an accurate ticket directly to a defect tracking system.

QuorumLabs

Fremont, Calif.

CEO: Larry Lang

QuorumLabs develops disaster recovery solutions that enable recovery of critical systems after a storage, system or site failure. Available as an appliance or hybrid cloud solution, QuorumLabs’ onQ systems automatically maintain up-to-date and ready-to-run virtual machine clones of users systems. In the event that a server fails, onQ takes over the failed server in minutes for one-click recovery, according to the company's website.

RelayWare

Redwood City, Calif.

CEO: Mike Morgan

Taking a page from the CRM playbook, RelayWare sells cloud-based partner relationship management (PRM) apps. Businesses use RelayWare’s apps to recruit business partners, manage their partner networks and optimize indirect sales.

Revolution Analytics

Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Dave Rich

Revolution Analytics offers software and services that support users of "R," the open-source programming language for developing statistical software and data analysis applications. Founded in 2007, Revolution Analytics offers both commercial and free "community" versions of its Revolution R software. The company works with a range of professional service, technology, OEM and VAR partners. In 2011, Revolution Analytics struck a deal with IBM to run Revolution R Enterprise on the IBM Netezza TwinFin data warehouse appliance.

RJMetrics

Philadelphia, Pa.

CEO: Robert J. Moore

RJMetrics offers a hosted business intelligence solution designed for businesses and non-profits that operate database-driven websites, according to the company. The company was founded in 2008 by Robert Moore and Jake Stein, who found that many investment prospects at their former tech-focused private equity and venture capital firm were unable to produce deep analyses or use company data to help them make business decisions. The RJMetrics solution uses proprietary algorithms to extract data and store it in a PCI-compliant data warehouse, where the data is analyzed and reported back in a more user-friendly format on a hosted dashboard, according to the company.

SalesFusion

Atlanta, Geo.

CEO: Chad Ruff

SalesFusion develops a line of B2B marketing automation, CRM and email marketing apps. In early 2011, the company unveiled version 6.0 of its SalesFusion 360 marketing demand generation platform with new event management and social media marketing capabilities.

ScaleArc

Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Varun Singh

ScaleArc's iDB software abstracts database servers from application servers to provide horizontal scaling and connection management, as well as real-time visibility. The software is now in its second generation, supports a growing number of databases and is available for deployment in several modes.

SlimWare Utilities

Ocean Springs, Miss.

CEO: Chris Cope

Mississippi may not be a high-tech haven, but just outside of Biloxi in Ocean Springs is SlimWare Utilities, a provider of community-driven and crowd-sourced software and services designed to clean, repair, update and optimize PCs. SlimWare was founded in 2009 on the premise that "cloud computing and crowd-sourced applications will revolutionize the performance of personal computers." With that in mind, SlimWare Utilities offers downloadable software and services that let users tidy up and update their machines with its trio of flagship products: SlimComputer, SlimCleaner and SlimDrivers.

SmartDeploy

Seattle, Wash.

CEO: Aaron Suzuki

SmartDeploy is a provider IT systems management solutions that reduce the cost and complexity of managing Windows clients and servers. The company is also boosting its channel presence with its SmartDeploy Partner Network dedicated software program.

Sokrati

Pune, India

CEO: Ashish Mehta

Software and services firm Sokrati was started in 2008 by Amazon alums Ashish Mehta, Santosh Gannavarapu and Anubhav Sonthalia, who moved to India from Seattle to found the company. Sokrati provides technology and services to online merchants, which automatically optimizes the placements of their clients' online ads. Sokrati technology is built using Ruby-on-Rails for the front end, and Linux + MySQL + Java on the backend. The company uses Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Tidemark Systems

Redwood City, Calif.

CEO: Christian Gheorghe

Founded in 2010, Tidemark Systems targets applications in consumer products, manufacturing, retail and high-tech companies. In January, the company secured $24 million in third-round funding from venture capitalists and PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield. The company develops what it calls the first enterprise performance management platform and applications built for cloud computing. Big data comes into the picture because the Tidemark EPM application system is built on Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop, allowing it to extract value from massive volumes of complex data.

VersaReports

Atlanta, Ga.

CEO: Andy Feibus

Report servers are portals for back-end reporting engines that businesses can use to schedule and manage the dissemination of reports to managers and employees. Founded in early 2009, VersaReports' ReportServer works with any report designer, including Crystal Reports, DevExpress XtraRepors and Telerik Reporting. VersaReports initially focused its sales efforts on report designers, but the company is now working with business intelligence resellers and solution providers.

Viewfinity

Waltham, Mass.

CEO: Leonid Shtilman

Viewfinity provides privilege management and application control solutions for desktops, laptops, mobile devices and servers. By enforcing permission policies for endpoint access to applications and desktop functions by controlling user rights, businesses can better meet compliance mandates, reduce security risks and lower IT costs.

Zendesk

San Francisco, Calif.

CEO: Mikkel Svane

Zendesk, founded in 2007, develops Web-based help desk and customer support applications the company said goes beyond the traditional "trouble ticket" approach to communicating with customers. Zendesk's software, now used by more than 5,000 companies, helps businesses communicate with customers using multiple channels. "The true voice of the customer is increasingly social," said Maksim Ovsyannikov, Zendesk product management vice president. Recently Zendesk integrated its software with Twitter, allowing customers to monitor feeds for comments on their products and pull them into Zendesk, and developed links to data generated by Salesforce.com's CRM app.

Zerto

Boston, Mass.

CEO: Ziv Kedem

Zerto offers enterprise-level disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. Zerto Virtual Replication, its flagship, hypervisor-based product, is designed for tier-one applications. It integrates cloud and enterprise business continuity and disaster recovery and replaces traditional array-based backup and recovery systems not developed for virtual environments. Zerto is headquartered in Herzelia, Israel, and in Boston, and is funded by U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Zettaset

Mountain View, Calif.

CEO: Jim Vogt

Originally launched in 2009 with the name GOTO Metrics, Zettaset has developed a fault-tolerant system built on Hadoop and other open-source technologies for aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. The technology, according to the company, helps manage the health, security and administration of the entire enterprise Hadoop system. Zettaset, based in Mountain View, Calif., launched version 4 of its software in December with new service management features and a unique visual user interface. The company renamed itself in July (after closing a $3 million round of financing) after a zettabyte -- equal to 1 million petabytes or 1 billion terabytes of data.

More 2012 Emerging Vendor Coverage

CRN's 2012 Emerging Vendors:
Emerging Vendors 2012: Security Vendors
Emerging Vendors 2012: Storage
The 25 Coolest Emerging Vendors For 2012
2012 Emerging Vendors: The List