The concept of cloud computing has permeated the startup worlds and is steadily encroaching on the enterprise, and the 11 startups we selected as the finalists for this year’s Structure LaunchPad competition show how far the cloud’s reach has come. Maybe these startups aren’t as glamorous as Pinterest or as easily understood by the lay web user, but they’re providing the plumbing of the web, essential data for our current applications and offering products that help enterprises transition to the next level of IT.
Because of a tie in the voting process, once again we have 11 finalists instead of 10, which just means more fun for our audience and judges.
So, meet our 11 LaunchPad finalists:
Atlantis Computing: This startup, which has been providing virtual desktop services for years, plans to launch a new product that will lower the cost of storage for all by taking advantage of commodity hardware.
Cirro: This startup empowers non-technical analysts to perform complex analysis on big data and traditional data with the simplicity of Microsoft Excel or other business intelligence tools.
Cluttr: Worried about your data center’s carbon footprint (or maybe just the high cost of power)? Cluttr is a startup that will help companies deploy OpenStack-based infrastructure as a service and will track power consumption associated with it.
ComputeNext: Cloud brokerages have come and gone, and this startup hopes to re-ignite the idea again now that the market has matured. It bills itself as a transparent marketplace for consumers and providers of cloud services that enables the search, purchase and utilization of compute resources.
Garantia Data: Our data isn’t getting any smaller, so this startup aims to offer a fully automated cloud service for reliable memcached and infinitely scalable redis, requiring zero management and guaranteeing absolutely no data loss.
Keen: Mobile is another hot topic tied to the cloud, and Keen provides analytics infrastructure as a service for mobile applications. Its service tracks every gesture a user makes in a mobile app and servers up the data via the cloud.
MLstate: Does the app economy need a new programming language? MLstate thinks so. It is the provider of Opa, a new open source cloud development language designed to accelerate time-to-market for high-performance, massively scalable, exceptionally secure services and applications on any connected device.
OneOps: This startup allows organizations to design cloud-based applications that combine software requirements with business goals, automating the transition to agile operations.
Stormpath:There are a lot of identity-management products out there, but the problem still ins’t solved. Stormpath develops cloud-based identity and access management tools and API services, and supports the Apache Shiro project, an easy-to-use Java security framework installed in more than 100,000 organizations.
Tempo: Another big data play, Tempo has built a custom data store designed to keep and analytics massive streams of time-series data generated by sensors and connected devices.
ThroughPuter: Chip nerds will love this, as will anyone dealing with certain data queries, transcoding and other tasks suited for parallel processing. The startup wants to build a platform as a service for parallel program development and execution.
I can’t wait to see these startups pitching their plans onstage at Structure 2012 in San Francisco. They will pitch on Wednesday, June 20 at 5 p.m., so grab a ticket if you’d like to attend, or tune in on Wednesday via our live stream. You’ll have to check back Wednesday morning for the link.
The cloud is giving way from being a new concept to becoming an accepted way of doing business. As that happens, more people and companies are taking advantage of the flexibility and agility the cloud offers to build apps, parse data and create new businesses. These startups embody that shift from the cloud as the story to the cloud as a tool to tell new stories. Join us in June to hear these stories unfold.
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