Datacenter Automation

If you look at the hour hand of a clock you will not notice the movement, but you cannot conclude from your observation that hour hand does not move.

Similarly if you daily look at what is happening in cloud computing you will hardly see any movement. However, if you step back and compare the present with the scenario that existed two years back you will get a more realistic picture of the change.

You want to know “what is hot” and “what is not” in cloud computing then you should look at where the startups put their entrepreneurial energy and Under the Radar conference is a good place to find some of the promising startups. This is twice a year event where around 30 startups get six minutes on stage to try to impress a group of skeptical venture capitalists looking for companies with good ideas and at least the potential for good execution.

However, if you want to know how the cloud computing scenario has changed in last two years then you should compare the profile of the startups with the companies that presented 2 years back.

Shifting focus

Two years back the primary focus was on:

1. Tooling for managing cloud application and environment (13 out of 27)
2. Best way to store data in the cloud (6 out of 27)

However, this event had an entirely different focus:

1. PaaS and other …as a Service (10 out of 32)
2. Different types of analytics including social analytics and use of big data (7 out of 32)
3. Hosted mobility solutions (6 out of 32)

Yes, tooling for cloud monitoring and management still had 7 entries but you can see that it about half of what it was 2 years back.

What can we conclude?

1. The base cloud infrastructure is maturing and it has enough build in management capabilities
2. Forrester was probably right when it predicted that in the coming PaaS will grow faster than IaaS
3. Mobility has become one of the big drivers of cloud adoption

Full List of Companies

Here is a full list of 32 companies that participated in the Under the Radar event on April 25th-26th, 2012.

…(as a Service)

1. AppFog: Multi-language and multi-infrastructure support
2. AppHarbor: Fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service
3. CloudBees: Java Platform as a Service
4. Fabric Engine: To deploy high-performance applications using dynamic languages
5. Iron.io: Elastic products for cloud messaging and background processing
6. MongoLab: Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS)
7. Nodejitsu: Node.js hosting platform
8. Sauce Labs: Simple-to-adopt, software test infrastructure
9. Tracelytics: Application performance management (APM) software as a service
10. Zadara Storage: Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service at major Cloud providers

Monitoring & Management

1. Cloudability: Manage and monitor all of your cloud costs in one place
2. Cloudyn: Analyzes cloud usage, and recommends how to optimize it
3. Datadog: Aggregates metrics and events across the full Dev/Ops stack:
4. Nodeable: View, analyze, and manage cloud infrastructure and services
5. Piston Cloud Computing: Scalable private cloud OS to manage private cloud environments
6. Puppet Labs: Open source datacenter automation solution
7. ScaleArc: Database infrastructure software which works with different databases

Analytics & Big Data

1. Chart.io: Charting tool which helps businesses analyze and track their critical data
2. DataSift: Manages large volumes of information from a variety of social data sources
3. Drawn to Scale: Database for real-time Big Data based on Hadoop
4. Infochimps: End-to-end Big Data solution
5. Metamarkets: Analytics platform delivers real-time insight on web-scale data
6. Sumo Logic: Log management and analytics that leverages Big Data

Mobile

1. Bitzer Mobile: Platform to securely access enterprise applications on mobile devices
2. Cabana: Browser based mobile app development platform
3. Framehawk: Enables enterprises to develop and deliver secure mobile client apps
4. ionGrid: Secure solution for mobile workers
5. StackMob: Cloud-based mobile platform

Others

1. Cloudscaling: Provider of open cloud solutions
2. Duo Security: Hosted two-factor authentication service
3. MemSQL: Scalable, memory-optimized database
4. NuoDB: Decentralized and SQL compliant database that guarantees ACID transactions