As the Information Technology market continues along its massive disruption path due to the continual ramp of Cloud Computing adoption, startups are launching in droves to fulfill the gaps that large and sluggish incumbents have yet to fill.  From storage, monitoring, management, performance, etc, you name it, there are top notch engineers out there tackling all things cloud related.

The folks at DealMakerMedia held their bi-annual UnderTheRadar event, this one focusing on Cloud Computing related startups, that have entered the market in the past year, or are just beginning to launching now.  The day was full of presentations across categories such as Data 2.0, Analytics, Virtualization, Infrastructure, to name a few.  To vet the presentations and pitches the startups are delivering DealMakerMedia brings together a great mix of Enterprise representatives, Venture Capitalists, and execs from Service Providers and Web 2.0 companies.  After all the presentations two of the startup’s are given awards, one by the judges, the other based on audience voting.

Winning the peoples choice award was NorthScale, who presented in the Data 2.0 category.  NorthScale is a new startup launching recently, but operating in a category already occupied by startups Gear6 and Schooner Information Technology.  Each of these startups are delivering supported, commercialized versions of the extremely popular Open Source in-memory key/value store, Memcached, which is used by pretty much every single web related company, and an increasing amount of enterprise companies.

Memcached allows web developers to increase response times while taking load of their primary database system(s).  An edge that the NorthScale team has over Gear6 and Schooner is that they are some of the core contributors to the core Memcached Open Source project.  This gives them a leg up in having better insights and control over future Memcache enhancements as they evolve their Membase management product and begin to ramp sales.  Currently they tout Zynga as a luanch customer which helps lend some street cred, not to mention the $5 million they have raised.

Taking home the judges award is recently renamed Puppet Labs.  Started a few years back as consulting firm Reductive Labs, the Puppet team/community, headed by creator Luke Kanies, created the Open Source Configuration Management framework Puppet and delivered infrastructure management consulting services.  Last year they raised a round of money from TrueVentures and are starting to work towards monetizing the Puppet Framework as a product/community instead of just delivering professional services. 

Of course with the explosion of Virtualization and Cloud adoption configuration management is a ripe area for improvement on the wildly overpriced and complex  solutions from incumbents such as HP and BMC.  Other startups operating in the space are Opscode, the team behind the Chef configuration management framework, as well as long time Open Source project Cfengine, which has also recently decided to start monetizing beyond just consulting services.  Luke delivered a fantastic presentation, you can view it here, where he did a great job of outlining his organizations mission, while poking fun at the massive incumbents who his firm will be replacing.

Another standout that was not a winner, but delivered a fantastic presentation was Spain based startup Kanamik, presenting on the Compliance track.  For how important of a role compliance will play in the future it was a relatively under-attended track as people gathered next store to see the Analytics companies present.  Those folks missed CEO Mark Searle deliver a rapid-fire, but clear/concise presentation, and following it up by nailing everything the judges through at him.  Kinamik delivers a very cool data integrity and compliance solution with the help of their tiny client that IT shops run on any machine storing/transmitting enterprise data that needs to be tracked. 

They have good early traction with a few enterprises, as well as system integrator Accenture.  As they ramp their business and prepare to open official U.S. operations they are definitely a startup to lookout for as it is solutions like theirs that will allow enterprises small and large do more then just dip their toe in the Cloud Computing pool.