March 2013
The Day at Lightspeed Ventures with 10 Emerging Tech Startups
I had the pleasure of spending the day at Lightspeed Ventures of Menlo Park, Ca with eight other CIOs (or senior staffers) from around the San Francisco Bay Area interacting with and providing feedback on 10 emerging tech start-ups backed by Lightspeed – one of the top venture capital firms on the planet, being in business for 20 years and having funded over 200 companies. The event was organized and setup by CIO Magazine.
Each tech start-up had 30-40 minutes to tell their story and present their products and services while gaining valuable feedback from real-world CIOs.
While all the start-ups had compelling products, here are my top picks:
PernixData
Market Positioning: dramatically improve server performance at the data layer without expensive new hardware.
Solution: PernixData software layer leverages pool of Flash memory across multiple servers providing an enterprise-class, high-speed, software-only data tier for application acceleration –
PernixData Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) is created by virtualizing server-side flash via a scale out architecture. Virtualized applications transparently leverage FVP for unprecedented performance while requiring no changes to either the application or the underlying storage infrastructure. Clustered hypervisor features such as live migrations and distributed resource management continue to operate seamlessly with FVP. By virtualizing flash in servers, PernixData is picking up where hypervisors left off after virtualizing CPU and memory.
Personally this was the most intriguing product of the day as it provides a hardware agnostic solution for speeding up data layer performance without having to buy expensive SAN replacements. Wow, what a pleasure to be pitched a solution that did not require a rip and replace!
PernixData just came out of stealth mode and their product is still in Beta – click here for more info!
Mulesoft
Market Positioning: speed connecting enterprise apps with cloud apps using cloud or premise middleware that provides a turn-key connection solution to 1,000s of published APIs.
Solution: CloudHub™ integration platform as a service (iPaaS) allows you to build and offer repeatable integration applications without creating custom code. Connect applications on premise or in the cloud in a matter of days, not weeks –
Amazingly Mulesoft has over 13,000 published APIs and actively supports 140 of the most used APIs. Nice! What a joy to have such a resource for connecting your legacy enterprise apps to the ever-growing cloud services without heavy custom coding.
MuleSoft provides the most widely used integration platform for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise
With the rise of cloud and mobile, enterprises face a choice: become overwhelmed by the resulting explosion of end points or seize the opportunity to gain competitive advantage. Founded on the idea that connecting applications should not be hard, MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration.
Nutanix
Market Positioning: gain ultra high-performance in your data center using the same proprietary technology used by Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Solution: Nutanix next-generation converged infrastructure solution that consolidates the compute (server) tier and the storage tier into a single, integrated server platform –
Each Nutanix node provides a self-contained CPU and storage solution and as each additional node is added, the storage becomes available across all nodes thus removing the complexity of managing complicated storage systems (SANs) and allowing an extremely flexible solution for growing your data center at the speed of light!
The Nutanix NX-2000 solution delivers some knock-out specs:
If that’s not enough then there is the NX-3000 powering up to 400 virtual desktops!
Nutanix is a paradigm shift for building out data centers as it completely simplifies the storage design process and removes that ever persistent SANs headache we all feel!
Grateful Acknowledgement
Grateful acknowledgement to Adam Dennison at CIO Magazine and Krish Parikh at Lightspeed Ventures for arranging and coordinating this wonderful event!
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