DEMO 2011: Five Stand-Out Cloud Products for the Enterprise
Cloud computing startup companies took the stage for six-minute pitches on day one at DEMO Spring 2011. Here's a look at five notable cloud upstarts targeting the enterprise.
CIO — On day one of the DEMO Spring 2011 conference this week in Palm Desert, Calif., a slew of start-up companies pitched products ranging from an ecoATM that recycles old gadgets to a Web site that lets customers virtually try on clothes using their Web cams.
The six-minute pitches and business models came in many flavors, but the common theme across these upstarts striving for consumer and enterprise dollars was — you guessed it — cloud computing.
Cloud-based technologies (and some virtualization) loomed over most of day one's presentations. On the enterprise side, there was a big emphasis on using social networking to improve the bottom line, consolidating cloud-based content for a more organized workforce, and how to best manage your data in the cloud.
Here are five enterprise cloud products that generated on buzz on DEMO day one.
Slideshow: 20 Awesome Tech Products at DEMO 2011
Workface from Workface
Workface is a cloud-based platform that helps connects salespeople to customers. The Workface technology takes a salesperson's skills and identity and turns it into an interactive business card-like window — called a profile — that includes title, job summary, video, text, images, documents and links.
All salespeople's profiles are enabled on your Web site through the Workface toolbar and allow for two-way conversations when customers visit your site through text, audio or video. Sales professionals can be geographically and contextually matched up with customers visiting your site, helping turn Web traffic into qualified leads. Profiles can also be distributed wherever customers are online such as blogs, articles, Web sites, social media, paid advertising and search results.
Competition: No direct competitors.
Stratosphere from V3
Want to trade in your heavy laptop for access to your desktop on any computer or tablet? Maybe V3 Systems can help. V3 is a virtual desktop infrastructure vendor whose appliance, called Stratosphere, allows companies to deploy virtual desktops that draw less power and are two to eight times faster than local desktops. A demo at V3's on-stage pitch proved that images and PowerPoint slides download twice as fast on a V3 virtual desktop than a local one. V3 claims that virtual desktops delivered by Stratosphere use a fraction of the power compared to traditional VDIs, which require a SAN (storage area network).
Stratosphere supports up to 400 virtual desktops and uses only 1U of rack space, according to V3.
Competition: Various vendors that provide a different piece of the virtual desktop stack. But Stratosphere is the first drop in virtual desktop appliance, according to V3.
