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10 Innovative Products for CIOs

The 11th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced the 10 finalists for its 2014 Innovation Showcase. The selected companies, according to organizers, “have developed cutting edge solutions that provide both strong value and innovation to enterprise IT.”The Innovation Showcase judges chose these 10 companies because they:

  • Have a B2B or B2C enterprise IT solution product in the market;
  • Are a start-up with less than $10 million in 2013 revenues or Series A funding;
  • Are selling enterprise IT solutions to CIOs or corporate IT departments; and
  • Show innovation and/or strategic value and potential impact on the top and/or bottom lines.

The 10 finalists for 2014 are:

  1. Big Switch Networks, Mountain View, CAThis Bare Metal Software Defined Networking (SDN) company is at the forefront of the next generation of networking technologies. Big Switch Networks and Dell last week announced a strategic agreement that will bring state of the art SDN solutions to an increasingly broad audience. Dell will resell the Big Switch Big Tap application, as well as the Switch Light Operating System, running on Dell’s high performance Open Networking switches, according to MarketWatch.com.
  2. Cambridge Semantics,  Boston, MACambridge Semantics’ award-winning Anzo software makes data smarter, enabling next-generation integration, search and analytics of structured and unstructured data. Cambridge Semantics has also had its Anzo product suite named a finalist for two industry awards: the 2014 SIIA CODiE Software Award for Best Business Intelligence/Analytics Solution, and the Bio-IT World Best of Show Award according to DigitalJournal.com.
  3. CloudPhysics, Mountain View, CAPredictive analytics for virtual datacenter management so IT can pinpoint and pre-empt performance and capacity problems and avoid datacenter disruption. CloudPhysics, who provides intelligent operations management for virtualized workloads, was named one of 10 Big Data startups to watch by Network World along with Altiscale, Ayasdi, BloomReach, Couchbase, Feedzai, MemSQL, PlaceIQ, Pursway, Sumo Logic.
  4. Code On Network Coding, Cambridge, MACodeOn is a MIT/Caltech spinout with technology that dramatically improves the performance of any products that store or transport data.
  5. Cybereason, Cambridge, MACybereason’s platform automatically uncovers malicious operations (Malops) and reconstructs them as a clear image of a cyberattack in context. Pando.com reported, “While most existing solutions focus either on preventing unauthorized access (zero day) or providing incidence response after an attack has occurred, Cybereason aims instead to identify and neutralize malicious operations – or as its coined the phrase, “Malops” – conducted by hackers once they’ve already penetrated a network. It was by founded by ex-Israeli Intelligence Services experts.”
  6. Device42, New Haven, CTDevice42 provides unified inventory, energy, IP management, application topology mappings, and password management for physical, virtual and cloud data centers.
  7. Luminoso Technologies, Inc., Cambridge, MALuminoso is a text analytics solution that allows businesses to quickly distill and analyze large amounts of unstructured text. A recent Wall Street Journal article said, Luminoso Technologies Inc., a five-year-old startup spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is part of a larger effort to use artificial intelligence to dig deeper into the minds of consumers by analyzing focus groups and surveys, online forums and social media. Luminoso’s software draws from a large database of common knowledge and relationships (such as, “the sun is hot”) to understand how words and phrases relate to each other.
  8. Pneuron, Nashua, NHPneuron offers a platform that taps enterprise data, applications and processes to deliver value in half the time and cost of current approaches.
  9. Quant5, Inc., Cambridge, MAQuant5 provides an easy-to-use and affordable SaaS suite for businesses seeking powerful data science to increase sales and optimize budgets.
  10. RapidMiner, Cambridge, MAA predictive analytics leader, RapidMiner is redefining how business analysts use all kinds of data, including Big Data, to predict the future.RapidMiner, an open source data mining provider with customers such as PayPal, Deloitte, and Cisco, is backed by Venture Capitalist firm Earlybird Venture Capital, which includes among its staff German-born Konstantin Guericke who cofounded Silicon Valley giant LinkedIn, according to VentureBeat.com.

The Innovation Showcase will take place at 5:30 p.m. in the Kresge courtyard tent on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The full agenda of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is available at its website