Seven new cloud companies to watch

By now we're all familiar with the big names in the cloud computing industry, just as Amazon, Rackspace and VMware. Nevertheless there are as well a whole host of cloud startups that are coming online to help you manage your cloud services provided by the big players. In this piece we'll profile seven of the top up-and-coming cloud companies that are helping clients do everything from keeping their cloud costs low to implementing their own private clouds to meeting security and regulatory needs.

"What is crucial about the advertising business is that you can't go down, you must have extreme reliability," says Citrusleaf founder and CEO Brian Bulkowski. "To illustrate, say if we were just down for 10 minutes -- that could cost you $20,000. So the fact that we have never had an outage at any customer sites is why people go to Citrusleaf."

The company does this

The company does this by combining traditional database technologies with a distributed system architecture that contains three key layers: a Client Layer that stores client libraries, a Distribution Layer that Citrusleaf says "is responsible for the cluster communication and cluster management operations," and a Data Storage layer that, unsurprisingly, is responsible for data storage.

"We've built a distributed database where each individual database server works at the same time as part of a distributed system," says Bulkowski, whose company received seed funding in March from Alsop Louie Partners. "That's why this is a cloud-oriented system. If the load is a certain level and you only have four servers they just don't go that fast. That's where distributed research comes in because you can add servers to handle the load now."

After Cloudability collects data from multiple vendors, it at the time can send you a daily email report providing all sorts of data on your cloud computing usage. Among other things, the report can tell you the amount you're spending each day and month on cloud services, the vendors you're getting services from, the type of cloud services you're using and how much different departments in your company are spending on cloud services. Ellis says this daily report can serve as a way for companies to check in to see what they're spending on the cloud every day and to get furthermore details on their expenses by logging into Cloudability's cloud data dashboard.

The concept of efficiency is different for everyone

"The concept of efficiency is different for everyone," explains Imad Mouline, the co-founder and CTO of Cloudfloor, which raised $3.1 million in Series A funding from Doughty Hanson Innovation Ventures and Dolphin Equity. "We'll help you analyze tradeoffs between measures just as cost, performance, resiliency and regulatory restrictions for all your applications."

Jim Lampert, CloudTP's co-founder and vice president in charge of sales and marketing, says that his company's comprehensive approach to helping companies make the move to the cloud and manage cloud services comes from decades that CloudTP CEO Chris Greendale spent doing similar consulting and software implementation work at his previous company, Cambridge Research Partners.

Why it's worth watching: It may seem strange to say that Piston Cloud Computing is worth watching although it has but to make any official product announcements. But together, what we do know about Piston is highly intriguing.

Why it's worth watching: You've heard of software as a service and infrastructure as a service however likely aren't as familiar with the concept of networking as a service.

Chris Marino, CEO of VCider, is hoping to change that with his company's Distributed Virtual Switch for Cloud Computing that can get cloud infrastructure from different vendors located in multiple regions to behave as although it's a locally controlled LAN.

Users can set up their own inter-cloud networks by logging onto their VCider account and downloading software onto all the cloud nodes they want to include in the network. The VCider system at that time gives them virtual IP address that can be used to communicate with one another as although they're located on the same LAN instead of on, say, different continents. Marino says that the idea is to take the basic framework of a VPN and scale it so that it can connect cloud servers directly to one another.

"With a VPN you typically have a box on the premises that users connect to through an IPsec tunnel where all users connect to the same box," explains Marino. "That works OK for desktops nevertheless when you bring that model to servers it collapses. With our networking-as-a-service system, every node can speak directly with its destination and you can scale more because you don't have a single hub to connect to and you don't have an extra data hop."