7 cloud companies on the rise
Move over, Amazon, Rackspace, and VMware; these startups help customers keep cloud costs low, implement private clouds, and more
By now we're all familiar with the big names in the cloud computing industry, such as Amazon, Rackspace, and VMware. But there are also 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 customers do everything from keeping their cloud costs low to implementing their own private clouds to meeting security and regulatory needs.
2010's IT COMPANIES TO WATCH: Where are they now?
[ In the data center today, the action is in the private cloud. InfoWorld's experts take you through what you need to know to do it right in our "Private Cloud Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Also check out our "Cloud Security Deep Dive," our "Cloud Storage Deep Dive," and our "Cloud Services Deep Dive." ]
IN PICTURES: Cloud companies to watch: A product sampler
Citrusleaf
Focus: NoSQL database management system
Founded: 2009
Location: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Brian Bulkowski
Product availability: Version 2.0, now
Why it's worth watching: Citrusleaf wants you to associate its NoSQL database with both reliability and low latency. And while those two qualities are important for most data centers, they're particularly important for a company such as Citrusleaf that powers real-time bidding applications for the advertising industry.
"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. "For instance, 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's latest database product, dubbed Citrusleaf 2.0, launched this past spring and currently has around 10 customers using it. The company says that "the most common deployments" for the database are "terabytes of data, billions of objects, and 200K plus transactions per second per node, with sub-millisecond latency." In other words, Citrusleaf 2.0 moves a lot of data with virtually no latency.
One of the major applications that Citrusleaf 2.0 performs is real-time bidding, a process that the company says "allows advertisers to analyze a site's users individually and to determine in real-time the right ad to serve based on a split second look into that user's buying habits and personal information." So if you're an advertising company that needs to get ads individually placed on sites depending on individuals' tastes and needs, you'll be able to get it up in real-time as the user is loading the page.
