Where are they now?

Last year, Network World identified 25 IT startups poised to develop innovative innovation for a new age of cloud computing, virtualization and mobility.

Nearly one year later, several of the companies have made big shifts, gotten acquired or even shut down completely. Most are chugging along, trying to build up their innovation and customer base. Let's take a look in the end year's "25 new IT companies to watch" and see where they are now.

The other end of the spectrum

On the other end of the spectrum, storage company Cirtas has given up. Cirtas built an appliance that works with cloud storage services by caching high priority data locally and storing secondary data in the cloud using WAN optimization research. Nevertheless it turned out to be a bust.

A network virtualization vendor we have high hopes for, Nicira, is on the whole in stealth mode nevertheless seems to be attracting some big clients. The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation issued a press release saying Nicira helped NTT implement a virtual machine live migration and cloud computing service. This helps NTT move data center operations to backup sites in case of disaster or overload.

Potential challenger to Intel

As a potential challenger to Intel, Calxeda has to be counted as one of the most ambitious companies on our list. Another company with a gargantuan task is LightSquared, which plans to build out a 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) network. LightSquared tells us its 10 clients include Sprint Nextel and Best Buy, the latter of which "will use LightSquared's service to deliver 4G wireless data service to consumers through its Best Buy Connect wireless service."

Actifio, a maker of disaster recovery and data protection software, says it is growing revenue steadily and expects to reach 100 clients by the end of this year. Actifio has added the ability to use cloud storage and introduced a de-duplication research that reduces bandwidth while data replication processes.

AppDynamics, a cloud application management company with 40,000 users of its free download and commercial product, has clients including Netflix, Priceline, Georgia Tech and Dell. AppDynamics recently added support for .NET including .NET applications running in the Windows Azure cloud service.

CloudFlare, which built a content delivery network that acts as a security service and network traffic accelerator, claims to have tens of thousands of clients from individuals to large corporations, and recently hit 10 billion monthly page views served to 250 million in a class by itself visitors. "To put it in perspective, that means more than 13% of worldwide Internet visitors passed through our network until further notice once in the last month," the company says.

JouleX, an energy management company with Internet Security Systems co-founder Tom Noonan as CEO, has signed up more than 125 clients and announced $17 million in new funding in June to fuel future growth. JouleX's innovative energy management software is capable of measuring consumption of all network-connected devices, from servers in the data center to HVAC equipment and lighting systems, and identifying opportunities for power savings.

Nimbula was founded by the creator of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to build software that takes clients' existing networks and turns them into infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. A public beta was launched in December, version 1.0 came in April this year and a new version to become available in September will make it possible to create a geographically distributed cloud.

Oxygen Cloud, a cloud storage service for work groups and enterprises, positions itself as a secure alternative to Dropbox. Oxygen Cloud has partnerships with EMC and Intel and has built apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android.

SeaMicro, which builds low-power servers optimized for Internet workloads, has lined up clients including Skype, Mozilla, Rogers Communications, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, France Telecom and China Netcom Broadband. With demand for energy-efficient data center equipment rising, SeaMicro says it is planning to triple its sales force over the then half-year.

Translattice, which speeds up access to applications and data for distributed and mobile workers with a SQL database appliance, recently released the second version of its product however declined to answer questions submitted by Network World.