I am here at the GigaOm Structure conference where this morning, six startups presented before a three-judge panel of venture capitalists: Luis Robles, a partner with Sequoia Capital; Bipul Sinha, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Ann Winblad, managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
SaltStack, a new DevOps platform, won the overall prize, and Factor.io won the people’s choice.
Here is a brief overview of the startups that appeared onstage:
28msec: Connects to all of a company’s data sources and integrates them. Data can be extracted, pre-processed, changed to JSON and queried in MongoDB. Robles said the service looks like an alternative to the old-school methods of extracting data using batch processes.
AppScale: The disaster-recovery company provides a failover for applications and data across cloud services. Its first commercial product is a backup for Google App Engine.
Factor.io: Allows for a simpler method for deploying to the cloud without the complexity so developers can focus on revenue generation.
MetricaDB: A data-integration service that uses SQL and acts as a console in the cloud. Services can be analyzed and results look like a table in a database. For example, a customer can integrate services such as Optimizely and Stripe.
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SaltStack: The big winner is a new DevOps, agnostic platform that can run on any cloud.
Synapsify: A text analytics company that measures and curates the overall value of a website. It measures quality against competing content.
An automation theme emerged out of the startup presentations. They reflect how more companies are focusing on making it easier to deploy apps and analytics, as well as providing the ability to manage more infrastructure with fewer people.
Data may be everywhere, but it’s the need to make it manageable that is drawing attention from startups.
