A sneak peek at some of Gartner's 'cool' vendors for 2018
We look at the analyst's latest tips for take off in four areas: cloud security, storage, edge computing and enterprise networking
Gartner has drawn up its latest annual list of emerging vendors that it considers to be ‘cool', and has shared some of its picks with CRN.
This year, the market watcher has highlighted 269 youthful vendors it believes could one day take the market by storm. Alumni of the research, which has profiled 3,700 vendors since its launch in 2004, include SkyHigh Networks and Infinidat.
Cool vendors must be "innovative, impactful and intriguing".
Cloud security
Alumni of Gartner's cool vendors for cloud security include SkyHigh Networks and Dome9.
This year, its picks are:
According to Gartner, Tel Aviv-based Alcide "provides visibility and control over multiple cloud environments. It enables DevOps and security teams to monitor, manage, and secure cloud infrastructure and applications by applying policies across public and private cloud environments".
It is cool "primarily for the breadth of its visibility across workloads that span any combination of container, serverless, virtual machine (VM), and bare-metal environments".
San Jose-based Aporeto "brings application-aware, default deny microsegmentation capabilities to container-based environments and it does this automatically using machine learning to build the models and patterns of communications", the market watcher states.
According to Gartner, this Dallas-based upstart "sets and enforces microsegmentation policies using the built-in native capabilities of the underlying cloud platform providers without requiring agents or third-party security appliances".
Another start-up based in California, this time in Mountain View, Lacework "uses machine learning to build application behavioural models, providing security protection and investigation for highly dynamic datacentre/cloud workloads without requiring any manual definition of policies, rules or manual tagging", according to Gartner.
San Francisco-based Luminate's software-defined perimeter (SDP) service "offers precise application- and identity-aware access to an enterprise's applications, services and data using a Google BeyondCorp 'zero trust' default deny connectivity model", the analyst reckons.
Storage
Gartner's picks for cool storage vendors, whose alumni include Infinidat, are:
Gartner notes that "aside from email-focused offerings, governance-oriented archiving to the cloud is surprisingly lagging in enterprise adoption". Enter CloudLanes, a Californian vendor founded in 2015 which according to the market watcher "provides more than just a lower-cost storage tier for ageing data".
Based in Santa Clara, California, and launched in March 2017 Excelero - in Gartner's words - "provides software-defined, scale-out server SAN storage by creating a pool of block storage from NVMe flash-based industry standard servers over a remote direct memory access (RDMA) network protocol".
Gartner hails this San Jose, California-based upstart's Memory Array as "an excellent example of the direction of the storage array market — small, fast, dense storage that requires no server software and can be implemented very quickly".
Sunnyvale, California-based StorReduce is cool because it "provides a scale-out data deduplication solution designed for cloud object storage", according to Gartner.
Another San Jose-based outfit, WekaIO "provides a parallel file system that can deliver high-performance elasticity and resiliency at scale while being software-defined and optimised for flash media", enthuses Gartner.
Edge Computing
With edge computing a cool area generally, Gartner's picks in this space are arguably doubly cool. Cool edge computing alumni include Rigado. This time around it's backing the following start-ups:
Santa Clara, California-based IoTium's offering "improves IoT security by isolating multiple and varied streams of IT and OT data as an easily deployable managed service". The firm is gaining traction with solutions deployed in more than 60 locations, Gartner noted.
This San Diego, California-based outfit is cool "for making AI solutions at the edge energy efficient and affordable", with facial ID for payment being a good example, Gartner opines.
Aside from the fact it is based in Tampere, Finland - making it automatically quite cool - Wirepas is cool "because it has developed an innovative mesh network protocol that is particularly well suited to large-scale IoT applications", Gartner says.
Enterprise Networking
Alumni in this category include Arkin, which was acquired by VMware in 2016. For 2018, Gartner is placing its bets on the following networking outfits to break through:
Yet another Californian outfit, residing in the fair city of Mlipitas, Cloudleaf deserves its ‘cool' stamp because its "innovative hardware and software creates a sensor fabric that generates a unique digital fingerprint with location and contextual condition data (such as temperature, shock and vibration)". This solves a problem for industrial IoT or other assets that have limited or no capabilities to provide this on their own, according to Gartner.
In Gartner's words, this enterprise networking vendor's freemium pricing tier — uncommon among Silicon Valley networking tool makers — dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for enterprises to gain value from its products.
Florida-based MetaPort is cool because it "can extrapolate the financial impact of incremental or major network infrastructure changes via its unique capability to autogenerate proposed business cases," according to Gartner.