10/20/2016 Five cloud computing startups to watch heading into 2016

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Five cloud computing startups to watch heading into 2016

By Alan R. Earls

Each year, a new crop of startups enters the ever-active cloud computing market. Given the tough
competition, most won't go far. But some of these cloud computing startups will thrive, prosper and maybe
even go on to change the technology landscape.

The odds seem good that in 2016 we'll see some new cloud vendors begin to have a real impact -- and
perhaps enough market traction for IT decision makers to take a closer look. 

Here are five cloud computing startups that caught analysts' attention this year, and are worth following in
2016.

Velostrata

Colm Keegan, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm in Milford, Mass., says his
organization has been focusing on how traditional businesses are incorporating cloud and how those
spending decisions will flow through the industry.

Velostrata, which recently came out of stealth mode, has a technology that helps streamline the movement of
data into and out of the cloud. "One of the concerns that you hear regularly is that if you push data into the
cloud, it will be hard to get it back, and potentially costly," said Keegan. As a result, data simply goes into
the cloud and stays there.

Velostrata, based in San Jose, Calif., has a tool that analyzes data to help businesses efficiently move into
public cloud environments like AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Its software also provides baseline
information to help businesses make cloud-related decisions, Keegan said. For instance, he explained, if you
have a 1 TB database, Velostrata identifies the small number of active gigabytes that are most suitable for
cloud hosting, along with those that are better suited to remain on-premises.

CoreOS
As container technology continues to gain ground in the enterprise, CoreOS is another startup worth
watching, Keegan said.

"They have created, in effect, an operating system for managing containers that integrates security and
management features that aren't available with Docker," he said. For instance, when IT shops need to run a
single container instance on multiple virtual machines, there is currently no central way to manage and
provision that environment. CoreOS, based in San Francisco, incorporates some advanced features and
functionality that help address that challenge, Keegan said.

Also, he noted, the CoreOS Tectonic platform runs the Google Kubernetes container management system,
along with software called Rocket, which the company claims provides a faster and more secure way to
deploy containers.

Ravello Systems

Ravello Systems, a startup in the software as a service (SaaS) market, is another cloud business that stood out
this year, Keegan said.

"They have a SaaS-based offering that allows businesses to rapidly create VMware instances in a public
cloud by leveraging nested virtualization," he said. Nested virtualization is the process of running a
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