10 hot emerging vendors for July

Tech Sector: Video communications

Key Product: faceVsion TouchCam N1

The Lowdown: faceVsion was founded in 2009. Its faceVsion TouchCam N1 is a HD video camera with an embedded H.264 codec chip and dual microphones, so it can provide users both HD video and excellent audio quality. The video camera is Skype-certified. The N1 lets users broadcast video in 720p and has an auto-focusing, wide-angle lens.

Tech Sector: Consumer Electronics, Cloud Computing

Key Product: Pogoplug

The Lowdown: Founded in 2007 by experienced entrepreneurs from the digital media and security industries, San Francisco-based Cloud Engines aims to change the way personal content is stored and distributed over the Internet. The startup’s Pogoplug is a device that connects up to four external hard drives to the Internet, enabling consumers or businesses to securely access and share all of their content -- files, photos and video -- from any web browser or web-enabled mobile device with no additional monthly fees.

Tech Sector: Services

Key Product: Process Solutions

The Lowdown: PerfeITo Software Solutions provides customised business process and knowledge process solutions. The Tamilnadu, India-based company looks to differentiate itself by tailoring its services for each specific client through an optimised 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.

Company: BBS Technologies

Tech Sector: Software

Key Product: Idera/R1Soft

The Lowdown: BBS Technologies was founded in 2004 with the expectation that Windows and Linux systems management software would play a critical role in the data centers of the future. As it turns out, that was a pretty shrewd assumption.

BBS Technologies currently does about 30 percent of its business through the channel. That figure is growing, however, as the company expands its business into Linux and the hosted service provider space, which often relies on the LAMP stack to develop and deliver apps, says Pleczko. BBS Technologies currently does about 30 percent of its business through the channel.

Tech Sector: Storage

Key Product: Scale Computing StorageNodes Clustered Storage Solutions

The Lowdown: Indianapolis-based Scale Computing, (CEO Jeff Ready shown at left), was founded in 2006 when a group of engineers built a supercomputer using Intel processors but couldn't find affordable, scalable storage to go with the server. What they did find, however, was a lot of midrange companies who wanted to buy scalable storage. So the supercomputer nodes were turned into storage nodes using the company's Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology which lets customers scale to multiple petabytes of capacity, 1 TB at a time.

Tech Sector: Cloud Computing/Virtualisation

Key Product: Nimbula Director

The Lowdown: Officially launched in 2010 by a pair of former Amazon techies (Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon), who were instrumental in building out Amazon's widely popular Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing offering, Nimbula is looking to change the way public and private clouds operate. Nimbula Director is the company's "cloud operating system" which Nimbula said takes the scalability, agility and efficiency of services like Amazon EC2 and puts them in a private cloud infrastructure while also giving companies the ability to customise and control their infrastructure.

It's aimed at the enterprise, with channel offer to come.

Tech Sector: Networking

Key Product: Ringio Rich Calling

The Lowdown: Call it a virtual PBX that thinks small is beautiful: Ringio's Rich Calling is a SaaS-based call centre platform targeted directly at those small- and mid-sized businesses craving enterprise functionality and sophistication at SMB price points. The details of calls appear to users either on desktop clients or through a mobile application for Android devices, which Ringio debuted during its official unveiling in late April. (The company, was itself founded in April 2009 by a trio of longtime SaaS and telephony executives, with the help of angel investors.)

Tech Sector: Storage

Key Product: SandForce SF-SSD Processor Family

The Lowdown: Some startups have bigger hurdles to overcome than others. Take SandForce, for example; the company was launched in 2006 and had the unenviable task of building a business around fab-less processors.

But SandForce isn’t just another microchip company. The Saratoga, Calif.-based company specialises in making solid state drive (SSD) processors that use standard flash memory in enterprise-level storage environments.

Tech Sector: Software

Key Product: DeskCenter Management Suite

The Lowdown: Administering desktop and mobile computers 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.

DeskCenter USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Leipzig, Germany-based DeskCenter Solutions AG (founded in 2007), offers a comprehensive package of 15 tools for managing physical and virtual desktop and client devices and the software running on them.

Tech Sector: Security

Key Product: AlertBoot Full Disk Encryption

The Lowdown: Based in Las Vegas, AlertBoot offers comprehensive, customisable full disk encryption, USB drive encryption and a comprehensive suite of disk security solutions as a centralised, managed service for companies of all sizes.

Specifically, AlertBoot is a web-based suite of data security tools built on the Sophos Safeguard Enterprise encryption platform, designed for individuals and organisations that need cost-effective, scalable disk encryption and laptop data security.