Four Aussie vendors on worldwide "Cool" list

Four Australian companies have earned worldwide attention by being named in Gartner's Cool Vendors list for 2014.

The Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane companies include a provider that using NFC technology to turn phones into BitCoin "wallets", as well as a DevOps company that counts Telstra and News Corp among its customers.

They include Brisbane company Diamond Circle, which is forging a reputation in the emerging field of Bitcoins. According to Gartner's report, the company sells NFC tags that function as Bitcoin "wallets - either hung from keychain or attached to a phone.

The company has been given a vote of confidence, with Gartner recommending that "IT leaders" in finance who are investigating Bitcoins should look into trialing the product.

Also getting a worldwide recommendation is Sydney based Plutora, which provides DevOps tools. According to Gartner the company was founded in 2012. The company has headquarters in San Francisco and lists the likes of Telstra and News Corp as customers.

According to the company's website, the founders built the Plutora product after trying to manage enterprise IT releases using spreadsheets and intranets.

Bigtincan is a Sydney company that made the Cool Vendors list for its content "hub", which according to Gartner acts as a central source for accessing PDFs, documents, PowerPoint presentations and files from Dropbox.

The company started in 2010 and was founded with venture-capital, according to Gartner's report. It counts UXC Connect as a partner.

Bigtincan chief executive David Keane said: "We believe this Gartner report validates that mobility will continue to transform how people work, share information and collaborate.

"The true value of mobile collaboration extends far beyond the ability to share diverse and complex content types from any mobile device – it is in the ability to understand the value and usage of content on an individual employee level, and create content recommendations based on this analytics data.

"We’re honored to be recognised by Gartner in this year’s Cool Vendors report alongside other collaborative technology vendors."

Another local success story that has caught Gartner's attention is Panviva, which was started in Melbourne in 1996 and now has offices in the US and UK, while listing ANZ, Westpac, NAB, Energy Australia and Western Power among its customers.

Panviva's product, SupportPoint, is designed to reduce up-front training for staff.