​The 12 Trailblazing days of Christmas: Cloud finalists

For our second seasonal roundup of Trailblazing startup news, we introduce to you the Cloud Trailblazers!

Cloud continues to be a hot topic in enterprise IT, and according to Forrester Research the global cloud market will top $241bn by 2020. TTA Cloud finalists come with a variety of different expertise – data protection, energy, hybrid cloud and more…

Well, EnergyDeck have been a popular bunch this year! Also finalists in Big Data, IoT and Sustainable IT categories, this startup have made their mark in 2014! In case you missed yesterday’s Big Data shortlist lowdown, EnergyDeck is a web-based platform that gathers energy and resource data, providing feedback to users that enables the acceleration of energy efficiency technology and practice. Founded in 2011, EnergyDeck is privately funded.

Also fighting for the Cloud winner’s title are Gridstore, who impressed judges with their software-defined storage purpose built for virtualization that is designed to accelerate applications in virtualized and cloud environments. The Californinan based startup is at Series B funding - backed by Acero Capital, GGV Capital, Investec Ventures Ireland Limited and ONSET Ventures.

Perspecsys have made their mark in the Cloud category with their cloud data protection gateways that enable mission critical cloud applications to be adopted throughout the enterprise. 

Rackware are amongst the Cloud frontrunners as well, offering intelligence and automation for the hybrid cloud, delivering solutions to easily and cost-effectively enable the use of public clouds for today’s enterprises. From California, this startup is at VC Series C funding – this year RackWare received $2.3 million in a funding round led by existing investors Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners.

SaltStack were also handpicked by the judges for their infrastructure and configuration management software that is used by enterprise IT and Web-scale organizations to automate the cloud factory assembly line. According to Crunchbase, this Utah startup received $685,000 Seed funding in 2013.

Also in the running is Boston startup SimpliVity: By assimilating 8-12 core data center functions, SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure delivers a 3x reduction in TCO to provide cloud economics with enterprise performance, protection and functionality. SimpliVity’s Series C funding round in November 2013 raised $58M, investors include Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, DFJ Growth, Accel, Charles River, Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom.

Last but not least is Toronto-based startup SlimCutMedia, who have found very few readers actually subscribe to paywalls to access premium online content. Therefore, their platform boosts that number by giving readers the choice to either pay for content, or watch video advertising to access it. In 2013, this Canadian startup received around half a million dollars in Seed funding.

More on this year’s Cloud shortlist…

• Comparing this year’s Cloud shortlist to 2013’s, we see a very interesting shift – 2013’s cloud shortlist was 100% dominated by fantastic USA startups. Whereas UK and Canada are the rising stars of Cloud this year, with Canadian startups accounting for 28% and UK 14%. USA startups no longer dominate the Cloud category completely, but still account for a strong 58%.
• Most Cloud finalists are 5 years old, with startups younger than this accounting for only 28%.

Want to help decide the Cloud Trailblazer? Vote for your favourite at www.techtrailblazers.com/shortlist/ before 23.59pm Pacific Time on 16^th January 2015.