​The 12 Trailblazing days of Christmas: Networking finalists

As 2014 comes to a close, we take a look at the Networking category, with startups from Belgium, the UK and USA that look set to blaze a trail in networking in 2015…

Seattle-based startup CENTRI’s BitSmartCX solution empowers mobile operators to intelligently optimize and manage the data traffic across their networks without introducing latency. CENTRI raised $4.5M in funding led by Matthew Pritzker Company – a Chicago-based private investment firm.

Another Networking category frontrunner is Fedr8, an innovative cloud solutions provider from Surrey, UK, with a mission to enable the adoption of and accelerate the use of cloud computing within business. Fedr8 believe that by significantly reducing the cost of application source code analysis and identifying areas of source code that need to be refactored in order for the application to migrate to cloud, they don’t just reduce the upfront cost but are able to accurately identify the cost of change, reduce the time it takes to make the change thus decreasing the time to value for customers. Fedr8 are privately funded through 2 Angel investors.

Also in the running is Pluribus Networks, from Palo Alto, CA who have achieved VC series C funding supported by Menlo Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Mohr Davidow Ventures and others. According to Pluribus, their innovation is the industry’s first and only bare-metal, distributed network hypervisor operating system, Netvisor, for the convergence of compute, network, storage and virtualization based on open compute and open networking technologies, enabling a new class of highly programmable network-aware applications and services.

From Belgium, finalist and runner-up last year Racktivity offers a full end-to-end power management solution, giving datacenters the right tools in hand to maximize business continuity while reducing their OPEX. By adopting this solution, datacentres are provided with a continuous flow of detailed and reliable rich power data.

Or perhaps US-based startup Sideband Networks will get your vote this year, for their unified solution which correlates live traffic with logged network traffic. This provides network administrators with a single point of management, analytics of network traffic up to 40Gbps addressing both physical and virtual planes, and intelligence that notifies with real-time alerts and action for their network issues. Organizations now have a dynamic network discovery visual tool for mapping their networks while also providing detailed drill downs for a complete understanding of their network. Sideband Networks latest funding was $6million at Series A funding in February this year.

Learn more about this edition’s finalists and cast your vote at http://www.techtrailblazers.com/shortlist/ by 23.59 PT on 16^th January 2015.