The past few years have been nothing if not a boon for entrepreneurs looking to cash in on venture capitalists’ lust for all things cloud.  All the activity has been great, and we’ve seen some exciting new companies emerge and prosper — companies such as Heroku, RightScale and New Relic — but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Startups that want to get noticed, get funded, and ultimately have a winning exit must either find their own unique niche or stake out ground on a different field altogether.

Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

1. AppFog 

AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.

2. Bromium

Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems.

3. Cloudability

Cloudability provides a simple service with a lot of value: it monitors customers’ spending on cloud computing resources. It might uncover something as commonplace as cloud-server sprawl because so many employees are spinning up instances, or it might find something nefarious such as hackers using a company’s instances serve boatloads of network traffic. As use of cloud services proliferates, companies will need an easy tool to help them keep track of what they’re spending and where.

4. CloudSigma 

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service space is a tough racket to enter because it means competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, but CloudSigma has a plan. The company is all about giving customers high performance and lots of control. CloudSigma sits in the impressive SuperNAP data center and offers 10 GbE interconnects as well as solid-state drives, and developers can buy and manage resources with the granular control normally found in co-location.

5. Kaggle

6. Nebula 

Nebula isn’t the only company pushing a commercial version of the open-source OpenStack cloud computing software — it isn’t even the only one founded by a former NASA employee — but it does have a unique approach and an impeccable pedigree. Nebula ties OpenStack to an optimized hardware platform designed to make building public clouds a plug-and-play experience. Among its founders are former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and investors include Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram.

7. Parse

Parse is trying to become a PaaS specialist for mobile apps, a laudable ambition given how many people now rely on their mobile devices just about everything. It will be difficult to distinguish itself from competitors such as Stackmob, as well as from web-app PaaS offerings such as Heroku and AppFog, but Parse seems to have the right ideas in mind. It has a backend focused on the needs of mobile apps, and a frontend designed for mobile developers that might not have extensive programming chops.

8. ScaleXtreme

What ScaleXtreme lacks in sexiness it makes up for in functionality. Everyone needs server-management software, but not everyone needs the big, expensive software offered from traditional software vendors, or even wants to manage software at all. ScaleXtreme gives users a cloud-based service to manage both physical and cloud-based servers, and, it says, has also garnered a lot of interest from cloud providers thinking it might be a good value-added service to their users who want more control.

9. SolidFire

SolidFire wants nothing less than to revolutionize cloud computing by making it palatable to large enterprises wanting to run mission-critical applications. The company targets cloud providers with SSD-based storage systems that make it possible to store virtual machine images in the cloud and still deliver high performance. Cloud providers utilizing SolidFire gear could find themselves hosting far more relational databases and other applications that presently remain in house.

10. Zillabyte

Zillabyte, still operating in private beta mode, wants to provide users with both data sets and the algorithms needed to process them. Data sets aren’t uncommon on the web, but they usually don’t come with algorithms and a processing backend. The service will initially focus on web data and text-based algorithms, but there’s plenty of room for growth into new types of data and algorithms as the service matures. Zillabyte was co-founded by two former Google software engineers and a former Intel engineer.

Reference: http://gigaom.com

 CIO — I don't know how I missed this, but at the Gartner IT Symposium in October, Darryl Plummer (Chief of Gartner Cloud Research) apparently stated that enterprises should deploy applications in a public cloud provider as a default, and only deploy them in a private cloud if the public alternative is not appropriate.

I became aware of Plummer's recommendation, which caused quite a stir in the blog world when he first announced it, via Twitter earlier this week.

Naturally, much of the furor over Plummmer's pronouncement was a reaction to the quick summary: Gartner prefers public cloud. Wow. That's a big deal, right? Gartner is probably telling all of its clients that they should trim their private cloud plans and instead focus on public cloud service providers. And, in response, all of its clients are scrapping their private cloud initiatives and planning a big move to public providers, right?

Actually, that's quite unlikely, for some very sensible reasons.

First, people misunderstand the nature of analyst firms. They assume that these firms are corporate in nature and monolithic in their positions. In fact, a better way to look at analyst firms is that they are much like professional firms (e.g., law firms, consulting partnerships, etc.). Such firms are comprised of relatively independent individuals, each with his or her own opinion.

For example, one can present the same issue to two attorneys within the same law firm and get two different recommendations about what to do (I speak here from personal experience). Likewise two analysts from the same firm will hold different opinions about the right approach to a specific technology issue.

Consequently, even if one or more (or most) analysts at a firm hold one opinion, there are probably others who hold a different opinion. At the very least, when presented with a specific issue, analysts will likely proffer different recommendations, based on their interpretation of the issue. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that every situation is specific and different. If blanket advice were sufficient, there would be no need for analyst firms. Let me be clear, I'm discussing this phenomenon in general—not picking on Gartner specifically. As I said last week, I am not one to gainsay Gartner.

Second, as a complement to the fact that opinion at analyst firms differs, clients tend to take their recommendations selectively. Companies tend to have their goals and they seek support and affirmation for them, searching until they find third-party advice that can be cited as impartial evidence for pursuing the direction that they have already decided upon. This is crudely referred to as "shopping for an opinion." 

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Enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs.

That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner's IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation, and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.

The trick for IT professionals is to perform a thorough analysis that identifies which benefits the company hopes to achieve by moving to the cloud. Of course, there are also reasons to not take the cloud route. Those include the inability to get the service-level agreements that you want, regulatory and compliance issues, concerns about disaster recovery and the realization that the cloud might not end up saving you money.

Plummer said an accurate cost analysis is particularly tricky, since you're weighing capital expenses versus recurring costs. He added that customers often underestimate their cloud usage costs, and most companies moving to the cloud will require the services of a cloud broker, which adds to the total tab.

While the cloud hype has reached a fever pitch, Plummer points out that there are a number of potential risks. Those include security, transparency, assurance, lock-in and integration issues. If you do decide to start moving applications to the cloud, start at the edges and work your way into the core, says Plummer. The most common apps to start with are email, social, test and development, productivity apps, and Web servers.

One other point to keep in mind is that individual business units have probably already moved to software as a service (SaaS), so Plummer recommends that IT execs make a concerted effort to get ahead of these rogue SaaS users.

If you break cloud revenues down by the three main categories, SaaS revenues come in first at $12 billion worldwide in 2011, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at $4.2 billion and platform as a service (PaaS) at $1.4 billion. But Gartner predicts that over the next five years IaaS will grow by 48 percent, while PaaS will only grow 13 percent and SaaS will grow 16.3 percent.

Source: Infoworld