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Worried about IT M&A, here come the new startups!

Late last year , I did a post (see here) countering the notion that there is a lack of innovation in IT and specifically around data storage. Recently I did a post about a Funeral for Friend, not to mention yesterdays post about Summer marriages.

For those who are concerned about lack of innovation, or, that consolidation will result in just a few big vendors, here’s some food for thought. Those big vendors in addition to growing via internal organic growth, also grow by buying or merging with other vendors. Those other vendors emerge as startups, some grow, blossom and are bought, some make a decent business on their own, some are looking to be bought, some need to be bought, some will see fire sales, liquidation or simply closing their doors and perhaps re-launching as a new company.

With all the M&A activity currently that has taken place, and I’m sure (speculation only ;) ) that there will be plenty more, here’s a short and far from comprehensive list of some startups or companies you may not have heard of yet. There are additional ones who are still in deep stealth, some on the list are still in stealth, yet talking and letting information trickle out, thus only non-NDA information is being shown here. In other words, you can find out about these via publicly available information and sources.

Something that I have noticed and talked with others in the industry about is that this generation of startups, at least for now are taking a far more low-key approach to their launches than in the past. Gone at least for now are the Dot COM era over the top announcements in some cases before there was even a product or shipping for actual customer production deployment scenario. This crop or corps of startups are taking their time leveraging the current economic situation to further incubate their technologies and go to market strategies, not to mention minimizing the amount of over the top VC funding we have seen in the past. Some of these may not appear to be storage related and that would be correct. This list includes those associated with data infrastructure technolgies from servers, to storage to networking, hardware, software and services among othes as a common theme.

Disclosure Notice: None of these companies mentioned are nor have ever been clients of StorageIO. Why do I mention this, why not!

Balesio – File compression solutions
Box.net – Internet/web/cloud storage service with high availability and backup
Cirrustore – Backup data protection tools
Dataslide – Hard rectangular disk (HRD)
Enclarity – Healthcare CRM and analysis tools
Enstratus – Amazon cloud computing management tools
Exludas – Multi core optimize
Firescope – CMDB data solutions
Greenbytes – ZFS based storage management solutions
Likewise – Open backup software for macs/linux/windows
Liquidcomputing – High density servers
Maxiscale – Web infrastructure (Stealth)
Metalogix – Archiving solutions
Neptuny – Capacity Planning
Netronome – Network and I/O optimization technology
Newboundary – IT policy management and IRM tools
Nexenta ZFS – based storage management solutions
Pergamumsystems – Archive solutions (Stealth)
Pranah – SMB Storage vendor formerly known as Marner
Procedo – Archiving and migration solutions
Rebit – Backup and data protection solutions
Rightscale – Amazon cloud computing management tools
Rmsource – Cloud backup solutions
RNAnetworks – Virtual memory management solutions
Scale Computing – Clustered storage management software
ScaleMP – Multi-core virtualization for scale out
SiberSystems – Goodsync data protection solutions
Sparebackup – Backup data protection solutions
StorageFusion – Storage resource analysis
Storspeed – NAS/NFS optimization solutions (Stealth)
Sugarsync – Backup and data protection solutions
Surgient – Cloud computing solutions
Synology – SMB storage solutions
TwinStrata – BC/DR analysis and assessment tools
Vadium – Security and encryption tools
Vembu – Backup data protection tools
Versant – Object database management solutions
Vipre – Security, data loss, data leak prevention
VirtenSys – Virtual I/O and I/O virtualization (IOV)
Vizrt – Video management software tools
WhipTail – Flash SSD solutions
Xenos – Archive and data footprint reduction solutions

Links to the above along with many other companies including manufactures and vars can be found on the Interesting Links page at StorageIO.

Food for thought for your summer technology picnic fun.

Nuf said for now.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

greg

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View Comments

Glen Pizzolorusso says:

July 20, 2009 at 2:58 pm

Just wanted to see if we could get added to the cool list :-) We are an ebiz consulting firm specializing in Salesforce CRM, Eloqua, and Omniture. We developed a CRM platform for hospitals and healthcare organizations that is really picking up traction. It smokes anything on the market currently, and offers a closed loop between sales, marketing and IT, previously unavailable. Check us out :-)