2010: Top 10 Cloud Computing Startups

Cloud.com (formerly VMOps) is a cloud platform software startup led by virtualization pioneer Sheng Liang, who more or less invented the Java virtual machine at Sun Microsystems. Cloud.com is in a crowded pack of cloud platform makers, but it had the good sense and agility to instantly shift gears after the OpenStack announcement. The company announced its support for Rackspace and NASA's new open source technology, showing its commitment to open clouds and its vision for making money on services and not software.

Its CloudStack infrastructure management product, which comes in the aforementioned open source variety, also offers virtual machine (VM) self-service provisioning, dynamic workload management, multi-tenancy, and all the other bells and whistles we've come to expect from a cloud management interface.

Besides its pedigree, Cloud.com has $17 million in funding from Index Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Redpoint.

Skytap has seen tremendous success with its virtual lab in the cloud that lets users run demonstration and development environments. Its customers are finding new uses for it, including setting up virtual training classrooms, and some have reported Skytap as so handy that they've tripled their own deployments.

Skytap also allows users to create virtual private clouds in their data centers, ensuring that the company has at least a toe in the private cloud market that's all the rage nowadays.

The company reports 500% growth in customers and says revenues have doubled over last year, although it doesn't break out real numbers. Skytap has raised $13 million since 2008 in two rounds of funding, backed by Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions and Washington Research Foundation Capital, and the startup may already be profitable.

Eucalyptus, brainchild of Dr. Rich Wolski and UC Berkeley's MAYHEM labs, is possibly the leading cloud platform software right now, with big customers like Eli Lilly and Argonne National Laboratory experimenting with it. The for-profit open source firm also has Marten Mickos, renowned open source money maker, as CEO.

Its platform interfaces with a bevy of big names: Amazon Web Services, Ubuntu, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0 now supports Windows machines and allows customers to implement scalable, portable private clouds. The Eucalyptus Community Cloud is a sandbox experimenting environment, and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud features Amazon EC2-like infrastructure capabilities inside your firewall.
Mickos just landed the company $20 million in funding, and while it's moving away from its open source roots with its Enterprise Edition, it clearly has an edge over the competing raft of cloud platform makers, especially among customers with big scientific computing needs. But Eucalyptus user NASA found the product wanting, and released OpenStack, a 100% FOSS project that might steal some of Eucalyptus' thunder. Eucalyptus has a comfortable $25 million to sort that out, from BV Capital, Benchmark and New Enterprise Associates.

RightScale is one of those companies that seemed to outgrow the startup label almost overnight. With more than a hundred employees and a customer base in the thousands, the name RightScale is synonymous with cloud computing success. The company's CTO Thorsten von Eicken still calls the cloud management company a startup, though, so who are we to argue?

One of the coolest things in RightScale's portfolio is a product it calls ServerTemplates, a blueprint of what a particular server should do in the cloud. It lets users deploy preconfigured, cloud-ready servers that know how to operate in the cloud: how to obtain an IP address, how to access and manage storage, how to submit monitoring data, and how to collaborate with other servers in a cloud deployment. ServerTemplates takes a ton of the tedious configuration management work away from admins while helping them to keep the infrastructure consistent and predictable.

RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said that, at one point, his company's pipes carried 2% of the entire world's Internet traffic, thanks to game maker and customer Zynga hitting peak usage on Farmville and other games. RightScale helped launch more than one million virtual servers by April 2010 and recently reported customer usage had grown 1,000% in a single year.

RightScale is clearly the preeminent cloud startup on the scene, and it has raised $22 million in capital to date, thanks to its last significant funding grab of $13 million from Benchmark Capital in December 2008.

Kaavo's IMOD cloud management technology is apparently good enough to partner with everyone under the sun -- from Rackspace to Amazon and beyond -- but we're not sure what its success rate looks like just yet.

Operating in a similar space to RightScale, Kaavo's service sits atop the stack, configuring, managing and provisioning your cloud environment. The company also offers multi-cloud, single system tools: a database back-end can reside on Rackspace while your presentation servers live on Amazon.

The company doesn't seem to have much room to maneuver, with no outside funding to date and VMware, Microsoft and other big firms looming on the horizon to snap up data center management, but its demo does look very cool.

Heruko is the little engine that could. Working off Amazon's cloud, its creators built and scaled out a programming Platform as a Service (PaaS) for the popular Web application language Ruby. It launched in May 2009 and has grown at an astounding pace: Heruko has run up to 80,000 Web applications at a time, up from 44,000 in January.

The company's multi-tenant platform and hosting environment runs applications that are fully managed and curated by Heroku behind the scenes. It also features various add-ons, including Twitter and Amazon RDS connections, as well as in-memory caching.

The firm started with $20,000 in 2008 and just landed $10 million more in funding, led by Ignition and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.

The cleverly named Okta (a unit of measure for cloud cover in the sky) doesn't brag about its customers very much, but it definitely has the right idea. It's in the "identity management in the cloud" space, targeting the intersection of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the enterprise and knitting them together so that users can get a single sign-on point of entry for many different SaaS applications.

The company's Cloud Area Network, considered by Okta to be the "evolution" of local area networks, consolidates, manages and protects your cloud apps. Operating in the SaaS realm, a less intimidating territory than full-on cloud services, may prove beneficial to the startup.

Okta founder Tom McKinnon ran Salesforce.com's engineering division, so he has domain expertise. Okta has $10 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Floodgate and a little bit from SV Angel and other individuals.

CloudSwitch is an early leader in cloud for a simple reason; it has correctly identified the opportunity in the enterprise market for public cloud and the technology needed to get there. With a premise something along the lines of KISS, CloudSwitch lets you "drag and drop" select VMware environments onto a public cloud service without any fancy footwork.

The company also offers a free trial version, known as CloudSwitch Explorer, that will allow curious customers to move five virtual machines (VMs) onto Amazon EC2 and try before they buy.

We're not sure how many customers it has or exactly how it accomplishes these feats, but the CloudSwitch team is a roster of enterprise veterans and they've raised $15 million since February from Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture and Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

A business intelligence (BI) Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, GoodData provides hosted data analytics tools, relieving this terrible resource hog from your internal infrastructure. Multi-dimensional analysis is very processor-intensive, and data sizes mushroom into the terabytes and beyond. For years, everyone has been forced to make tradeoffs between speed, power and cost when building analytics software. Because of this, most BI is prescriptive: pre-built dashboards answering pre-defined questions in pre-calculated OLAP analysis cubes.

GoodData takes a new approach. Running in the cloud, it is able to make ad-hoc analysis as fast and simple as prescriptive BI. That means new queries on new data sets are as easy as repeated queries on predicted data. Smart in-memory query processing and extensive results caching get over the performance hurdles.

It plugs in to Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and NetSuite, along with offering a free trial period. Customers include Enterasys Networks, TriNet, Gazelle, Black Duck Software, Salary.com, Sinu and MarketMatrix. There's some tough competition in this market, though, as IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, QlikTech, Birst and PivotLink all play in this space.

Take note of the company's founder: Roman Stanek has been a tech entrepreneur for almost 20 years. He was founder and CEO of NetBeans (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Systinet (acquired by Mercury Interactive and later HP). GoodData received its last funding round of $5 million in 2009, and its investors include General Catalyst Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Zuora's subscription billing services cut right to the heart of the matter -- getting paid -- and the company has packed in some big customer wins since launching in 2008 (including the now-defunct Sun Microsystems).

Using Netflix as an example of the growth in subscription services, Zuora says the model will soon dominate the industry and that its products help customers build, manage and grow their own subscription businesses. Zuora's Z-branded products include Z-Billing, Z-Payments, the Salesforce.com-integrated Z-Force and Z-Commerce for media, a tool for publishers to test new products and collect revenue online.

Zuora is partnering with big names like NetSuite and Windows Azure, and it is partly financed by Marc Benioff, we guess just for the star power. The company has about $27.5 million in funding from Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (renamed to Tenaya Capital) and Benioff.