Startups class of '06: Where are they now?

In 2006, InfoWorld uncovered 15 startups that emerged after the nuclear winter that followed the dot-com bust with cool, useful technologies. Well, another year has brought a new crop of startup darlings, such as the companies we're profiling each day in May for our Month of Enterprise Startups (MOES) feature. But MOES got us thinking about last year's startups. In the year that has followed, how have these innovators fared?

To find out, we went back to the startups we profiled last year and got an update on how the last twelve months have treated them: which are still standing, which got bought, and which are gasping for air. Here's a look at what a few of the companies we profiled last year are up to.

Fortify Software's technology helps IT developers identify security threats during application development and patch executable code on the fly to prevent malicious exploitation. In the last year, this "startup" has already acquired another company, Secure Software, and expanded its product line to include a tool to test executable code for security vulnerabilities. The Fortify Tracer tool is in many ways a repurposing of the on-the-fly patching tool Fortify Defend, CEO John Jack notes, with the key difference that it reports the vulnerabilities to the IT staff and helps narrow where the problems may be to help instrument defenses until the code can be rewritten or replaced with a more secure version.

Open source data integration vendor Jitterbit has continued to enhance its tools, which let business analysts create their own applications by dragging and dropping Web services and various data sources. Two new versions of Jitterbit's software released in the past year extend support to LDAP directories and Web services hosted within a company, as well as to plug-ins so users and third parties can add their own functionality (for example, support for proprietary compression and decompression). Going forward, the company expects to increase support for applications and data sources used by larger enterprises, notes CEO Sharam Sasson. The company continues to work on providing a way for users to share the workflows they create with others. That's a feature that is in the Jitterbit Server engine, but not exposed to users because the company is still working on an appropriate interface to that capability, Sasson says.

Splunk, the IT data search engine, has seen its users expand the type of logging and analysis for which the company's IT operations logging software is used. Splunk now does compliance and security logging. In retrospect, says CEO Michael Baum, use across areas makes sense as it lets IT use one technology to monitor and analyze a variety of activities that need to be audited. This adoption of Splunk’s technology beyond its original mission caused the company to increase the audit controls over the logs, such as logging all alerts resulting from logging and all searches made, as well as signing the logs to prove they were not tampered with, notes Baum.