10 hot emerging vendors for May 2010

Company: Avaak

Tech Sector: Wireless video

Key Product: The Vue personal video network

The Lowdown: Avaak’s Vue system allows consumers to monitor their homes or businesses via the Internet and access a live video feed through a mobile device. The system features a network of small, battery-powered cameras that can be placed anywhere. Vue wire-free cameras install in one minute with two-sided adhesive. Once a camera is turned on, and it automatically finds the network. Users log-in to a my.VueZone.com account and are on their way.

Avaak was founded by Gioia Messinger and Bar-Giora Goldberg in 2004 after they collaborated on a project to develop an ingestible diagnostic wireless pill camera.

The company has raised US$10 million.

Company Name: IoSafe

Tech Sector: Data Protection Hardware

Key Product: IoSafe Solo SSD

The Lowdown: IoSafe was started in 2005 when its founder and CEO Robb Moore decided to look for a better way to store and protect his collection of digital photos. “I just had my first child and we started taking lots of photos,” Moore said.

“I put them in an external hard drive, but there was no real data protection for all those photos.” Hence, Moore and IoSafe developed a series of disaster proof hard drives that provide local backup and can withstand quite a bit of abuse. For example, the IoSafe Solo solid state drive is fireproof up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes and can be submerged in 10 feet of water for up to 3 days.

Tech Sector: Storage

Key Product: Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, Zmanda Cloud Backup

Zmanda develops open source backup and recovery software, and provides resources to open source data protection projects as well as hardware, collaboration tools, and financial assistance to open source developers.

The company’s Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL provides a complete backup and recovery solution, including flexible scheduling, snapshots, and continuous data protection (CDP) for MySQL databases. The company also introduced recently a disaster recovery option for companies with one or hundreds of MySQL databases.

Company Name: gloStream

Tech Sector: Software

Key Product: gloEMR

Electronic medical records are a major opportunity for solution providers, and software vendor gloStream is helping VARs with the right skills navigate the esoteric ins-and-outs of the medical industry.

Founded in 2005, US.-based gloStream has wrapped its flagship gloEMR offering around the Microsoft Office platform because that's what the vast majority of medical practices use, according to CEO Michael Sappington. Like Microsoft, gloStream also places great importance on VARs, and the company does all of its business through the channel.

Company Name: CloudShare

Tech Sector: On-Demand Software Infrastructure

Key Product: CloudShare Enterprise

Today when a software developer or solution provider is selling a software product to a prospective customer, the company often has to set up an on-site system that replicates an entire IT environment. CloudShare Enterprise, an on-demand service, enables technology vendors to remotely provide product evaluations, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and training and certification without shipping machines -- and staff.

Company Name: Stage 2 Networks

Tech Sector: VoIP

Key Product: Stage 2 Hosted Business Phone Systems and Enhanced Voice Services

Unlike many competitors trying to shoehorn hosted PBX and VoIP options into their existing portfolios, Stage 2 designed its services offerings under a hosted model right from the start, said Simon Fitzsimmons, director of sales.

The six-year-old company specialises in hosted and managed communications for SMBs. Channel partners, particularly Stage 2's channel of nearly 90 agents, play a key role in the company's growth and according to Fitzsimmons enjoy healthy commissions and vertical-market specific education.

Company Name: RainStor

Tech Sector: Storage Software

Key Product: RainStor 3.5 software

Want to get a bead on storage and software vendor RainStor? It’s Data Domain for structured data, according to Ramon Chen, the San Francisco-based company’s vice president of management. Founded in 2004, RainStor took technology developed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense for running complex analytics on data and focused on building a better way to store and query massive amounts of data stored long-term, often by mandate, in areas like phone call retention.

Company Name: InVisage Technologies

Tech Sector: Hardware

Key Product: QuantumFilm

Traditional technology resellers may not see the fruits of InVisage Technologies’ recent labors directly, but they may find themselves pitching the value of the US-based startup’s QuantumImage light-collecting tech as soon as 2011. That’s the year that InVisage plans to launch full-scale production of its proprietary QuantumFilm, an extremely photosensitive material that is layered onto CMOS wafers used in small cameras such as those in many mobile phones. The upshot -- much better camera performance and image resolution than is currently possible.

Company Name: Eucalyptus Systems

Tech Sector: Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Key Product: Eucalyptus Enterprise

Eucalyptus Systems started as a U.C. Santa Barbara research project in 2006 and has grown into a full-fledged open-source private cloud software offering. Eucalyptus makes an open-source infrastructure software that gives enterprises and government entities the ability to build their own cloud computing environments, getting the most out of their compute capacity to boost productivity, deploy new apps and protect sensitive data all while cutting costs.

Company Name: Akorri Networks

Tech Sector: Virtualization Software

Key Product: BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software

Akorri Networks is taking virtualisation by storm. Just last month, the Littleton, US-based startup raked in US$10.1 million in Series E equity financing, pumping up the total venture investment in Akorri about US$58.5 million since the company was founded in 2005. The money, CEO Allan Wallack said, will help Akorri continue to build out its channel while focusing on the emerging virtualization and cloud computing markets -- two segments ready to explode.

Akorri makes virtual IT infrastructure management software and is 100 percent channel-focused.