4 Startups To Watch At Interop

NYC Vs. Vegas: 10 Fun Interop Differences

Interop's Startup Hot Seat session lets IT pros hear directly from unique new companies in the industry -- and question startup leaders about breakthrough products and services in the works. The inaugural session at Interop Las Vegas, in April 2014, featured a candid Q&A between the audience and four startup chiefs. "There was a lot of passion from the startups presenting… it's exciting to feel that energy," says Andrew Conry Murray, director of content and community for Interop.

Round two of Startup HotSeat, at Interop New York, will build on that model. The highly-interactive session on Thursday October 2 will feature:

[New York noshing -- check out our restaurant recommendations: Eating At Interop: 8 NYC Dining Options.]

"Our belief is cloud shouldn't be another silo; it should be an extension of the data center," Sunkara says. The company's third-generation product, RackWare Management Module 3.0, released in July, added disaster recovery capabilities.

You can think of RackWare in the same genre as RightScale. RackWare does not require apps be ported into a new OS.

[Editor's note: After this article published, RightScale Product VP Rishi Vaish contacted us to clarify this article's discussion of RightScale and base OS, and we updated the previous paragraph. Vaish said:"RightScale supports porting and automating workloads across ten different cloud providers. For convenience RightScale provides a rich set of base images should customers choose to use them, but RightScale fully supports customer provided images as well so that customers do not have to port to an unfamiliar operating system."]

RackWare supports migration of workloads into more than six clouds, including Amazon, SoftLayer, SunGard, CenturyLink, Rackspace, VMware, and NTT. RackWare's software can live in the customer data center or be accessed via CenturyLink, AWS, and SoftLayer for now, Sunkara says.

Is RackWare doing virtual machine file format translation? No. RackWare is not manipulating SDKs but dealing with images at the OS level, calling itself hypervisor agnostic. The tools monitor workloads across the cloud services and scale accordingly. RackWare's software helps companies run retail websites regardless of spikes in demand, for example.

Are you curious about RackWare's strategy for anywhere-to-anywhere migration -- physical to virtual, public to private cloud? Join us at the Startup Hot Seat session and hear more from RackWare and the other startups. I'll be among the panelists, making sure the conversation stays real, and I hope to see you there.

In its ninth year, Interop New York (Sept. 29 to Oct. 3) is the premier event for the Northeast IT market. Strongly represented vertical industries include financial services, government, and education. Join more than 5,000 attendees to learn about IT leadership, cloud, collaboration, infrastructure, mobility, risk management and security, and SDN, as well as explore 125 exhibitors' offerings. Register with Discount Code MPIWK to save $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.