Showdown

Below, are the 9 Innovation Showdown finalists. These companies, chosen from a pool over over 70, will battle it out live at CloudBeat 2011 to see who’s product/service is leveraging the cloud in the most disruptive way.

They’ll each have four minutes to showcase their technologies, and our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide thorough feedback and ultimately determine one winner. May the best one win!

GigaSpaces provides a new generation of application virtualization platforms. Our offering includes end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical applications, and cloud on-boarding technologies for any cloud environment – private, public, or hybrid. Hundreds of top-tier organizations use GigaSpaces to enhance IT efficiency and performance, from the financial, telecom, e-commerce, and other industries.

myERP.com is an incredibly fast-growing all-one-one business cloud application and one of the most popular apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. The myERP.com app helps small and mid-size businesses leaders run a business with tools for accounting, CRM, purchasing, inventory and more.

OfficeDrop is a popular cloud-based document scanning and document management solution that provides small businesses with affordable ways to manage their paper and digital files. The company converts paper and digital files into text-searchable documents, and its mail-in document scanning system lets clients mail documents safely for scanning later.

Oxygen Cloud enables companies to create private storage clouds that provide secure, anywhere, any device access to all corporate files. Oxygen replaces old-school network drives mapped to old file servers with a Universal Cloud Drive synchronizing access to shared files in the cloud.

Talkdesk lets customers bring their call center to the cloud and eliminates the overhead associated with traditional call centers. Typically, only large companies have the resources to do call centers and associated management properly. Talkdesk lets you act like a big company but without long-term contracts or infrastructure costs because it is in the cloud.

VirtualSharp Software offers its customers disaster recovery solutions for virtual data centers. The company’s next-gen disaster recovery can help control private and public clouds. Its software makes possible new levels of resiliency for virtual IT infrastructure and full alignment between IT disaster recovery and corporate business continuity planning.

Visier builds workforce analytics applications that help with and streamline human resource management. The company’s cloud apps, in one major example, optimize the largest expenses for organizations across all industries.

Xiimo’s free marketing platform enables small businesses across global markets to publish local promotions, accept mobile payments, launch loyalty programs and leverage smart analytics.

Zadara provides its customers with virtual private storage arrays within public clouds with the privacy, control and performance associated with standard enterprise-class storage arrays.

The judges for the Innovation Showdown will be:
Luis Robles, Venture Capitalist, Sequoia Capital
Robert Abbott, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
John Lee, Director, SVB Accelerator
Steve Phillpott, CIO, Amylin Pharmaceuticals