Money is the mother's milk of politics, it's been said, but when it comes to technology, ideas are the real coin of the realm. In that spirit, we present InfoWorld's hottest tech startups of 2008, an honor roll of 10 young companies whose business-oriented technologies should be on your radar screen.
We make the distinction between money and ideas for a simple reason: There are many factors that lead a tech company to economic success. Technology is just one of them. Marketing savvy, management talent, manufacturing smarts, timing, and just plain luck are often as responsible for bottom-line success -- or failure -- as technology. We wish our hot startups success in the marketplace, of course, but we've focused on the metric we at InfoWorld know best: great technology.
[ See who InfoWorld named its top tech startups for 2008. Discover other cool companies whose technology may inspire you with our 2007 Month of Enterprise Startups and our 2006 Hot Tech Startups features. ]
What did we seek? At least one of three qualities: truly new technologies, innovative approaches within existing technology areas, and technologies applied in new ways to solve different problems.
Laborious as it was, the judging rewarded us with a wealth of new ideas to ponder, new technologies to evaluate and, most important of all, the clear sense that innovation, the real engine of the technology industry, is not only alive and well but thriving in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Virtualization's big wave
As we evaluated the entries, we were struck by how many were focused on various aspects of virtualization. Some, such as Montego Networks, offer security for the virtual network; others, such as V-Kernel, offer innovative tools to manage and monitor virtual machines.
The wealth of virtualization-oriented entries is no surprise. Virtualization, in all its flavors, is becoming a mainstream technology, and the weakness plaguing the economy only serves to make its money-saving attributes all the more attractive.
Moreover, we're seeing a pattern that has occurred repeatedly in our industry: As emerging technologies take center stage, more and more companies spring up on the margins, offering products and services needed to complement the strengths of the early innovators. Interestingly, many of the newcomers to virtualization began with a focus on EMC's VMware, the segment's early leader, but are now broadening their scope to support technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and Virtual Iron.
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