Meet the top 100 cloud companies 2017 as per the Forbes list 07-12

Patrick Collison and Stripe are at the forefront of a new wave of cloud leaders.
The world is moving online, and business is going with it. The companies that make that journey possible – providing everything from infrastructure to security, chat tools to marketing and HR – make up the wide-ranging and red hot category of cloud computing.

For the second year, the Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes the best and brightest of the cloud. Compiled with the help of partners Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the list tracks candidates by operating metrics such as revenue and funding, with the help of 25 of their public cloud CEO peers.

The companies of the Cloud 100 have worked with the world's largest corporations and solved small business headaches alike, fixed people's grammar online and traced government sponsored hacking attacks. They're led in 2017 by Stripe, the online payments company founded by Irish-born Patrick Collison and his brother John, valued at $9.2 billion. Hundreds of thousands of businesses use Stripe's software to handle sales and other transactions on their sites, including Facebook, Lyft, Target and Unicef.

Stripe's joined by three other San Francisco companies in the top 5: file sharing and collaboration company Dropbox (No. 2), messaging platform Slack (3) and digital signatures unicorn DocuSign (4). But rounding out the group is a challenger to Stripe with sneaky-big revenue and its own multi-billion dollar valuation, Adyen (5). On a list still dominated by Silicon Valley, cofounder and CEO Pieter van der Does has quietly built his own would-be payments juggernaut. Adyen works with Facebook, too, but also Uber, Netflix and Spotify, processing $90 billion in transactions last year on $727 million in nearly-doubled revenue. The company bills itself as more international friendly than its California competitors, in part due to its scrappy Dutch roots. "We [have taken] it on as a badge of honor: Adyen, the unknown unicorn," van der Does says.

A handful of last year's Cloud 100 companies were ineligible this year due to exits.

The list features 25 newcomers from 2016's inaugural list, led by billionaire Tom Siebel's second act providing app-making software for the Internet of Things, C3 IoT (19). Siebel's joined by another repeat entrepreneur, Groupon cofounder Brad Keywell, in the fast-growing category that helps process vast amounts of data for businesses in aerospace, energy, manufacturing and more -- Keywell's Chicago startup Uptake now churns out four million predictions for its customers each week, good for a $2 billion valuation and a debut at No. 22.

Data and analytics companies make up the most list companies of any category with 15%, led by Utah experience management leader Qualtrics (6). Despite a population less than half of the Bay Area and New York, Utah's emerging cloud scene accounts for six companies on this year's list, and three in the top 20 as a model ecosystem for outsized tech success forms around the pre-IPO leaders with CEO friends, Qualtrics, Domo (15) and Pluralsight (20).

How the Cloud 100 breaks down by category.

With strong showings by IT operations firms, security shops, marketing companies and more, the Cloud 100 is at its best in the diversity of its offerings. At cyber firm CrowdStrike (30), business is booming after the company linked Russian government-affiliated hackers with the Democratic National Committee hacks. In health tech, Nat Turner and Flatiron Health (51) are looking to manage every oncologist office in the U.S. as well as help with clinical trials; Jennifer Tejada and PagerDuty (41) help spot operational failure before a website goes down for the count. Toast (68) helps restaurants manage their businesses, while Grammarly (90) offers a Chrome plug-in that can help writers use better vocabulary and catch grammatical errors.

Canva (100) CEO Melanie Perkins speaks for the mindset of many of the companies on this year's Cloud 100 list. The Australian design software maker already has 10 million users, but has her eyes firmly fixed on the future. "We have so much more to do. We feel like we've only done 1% of what is possible," Perkins says.

View the full list here

Dell and IIT Madras Join Hands to Drive Research in Next-Generation Infrastructure and Cloud Technologies 02-27

Dell and IIT Madras Join Hands to Drive Research in Next-Generation Infrastructure and Cloud Technologies

Dell, the world’s fastest-growing large integrated IT company, today announced its collaboration with IIT Madras (IIT-M) for joint research and development programme in the area of Next Generation Infrastructure and Cloud technologies.

As part of the partnership, Dell and IIT Madras will undertake collaborative research projects for next-generation technology and business needs. Dell aims to leverage the capabilities at the Dell Networking Centre and the talent ecosystem available in Chennai towards strengthening research on the subject. This industry-academia partnership will address research and development of next-generation Cloud technologies that would play a key role in industry verticals such as Telecom and Healthcare.

The partnership entails sponsoring of various research projects and funding of research scholars working in areas that coincide with Dell Research objectives. Additionally, the partnership provides internship opportunities for IIT-M students to experience industry environment and work on key technology challenges, pursued by Dell Research.

Announcing the collaboration, Dr. Jai Menon, Vice President, Head of Research and Chief Research Officer for Dell said, “Dell’s heritage is all about listening to customers and using that insight to create innovative technology solutions that help them succeed. While innovation has always been at the core of Dell, we now want to focus on disruptive, futuristic technologies. We strongly believe that industry-academia partnerships are key to fostering advancements in technology. We are confident that our partnership with IIT-M will bring unique approaches and compelling innovations for the future.”

Sreedhara Narayanaswamy, Executive Director & GM – Datacenter PD/PI Global Engineering & Chennai R&D said, “This partnership is very significant for Dell Networking center at Chennai to collaborate with IIT Madras. It allows bi-directional collaboration and research activities in which both the Chennai R&D team as well as the faculty and students of IIT-M realize long-term benefits.”

Professor R. Nagarajan, Dean of International & Alumni Relations at IIT Madras added: “We are constantly looking for ways in which industry can partner with us to enhance our research eco-system, and make our campus the top choice for faculty, research scholars and companies. In this context, we are delighted to join hands with Dell, an innovator within the technology industry for over 30 years. Our partnership will provide young minds with a tremendous opportunity to contribute towards cutting-edge research in the field of next-generation technologies and solutions.”

View at the original source

New IBM Entrepreneur Program: Bringing New-age Cloud-based Innovation and Collaboration for Today’s Startups 02-04

New IBM Entrepreneur Program: Bringing New-age Cloud-based Innovation and Collaboration for Today’s Startups

If you’ve been toying with the idea of joining the cloud bandwagon, there couldn’t have been a better time than this to do so. As a step towards making cloud technology more viable and accessible than ever before, IBM has announced the launch of the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups. This is exciting, because it’ll allow startups and midsize businesses to embrace cloud technology and integrate it into the business operations, will also help them tap into IBM’s global network of clients, consultants, and innovation centers . This means businesses can gain cloud benefits—things like scalable and flexible infrastructure, hottest innovations, next-gen cloud apps and much more – combined with the ability to make important connections within the industries they serve (and or want to serve).

Clearly, IBM is bringing to the table complete cloud solutions for young and early stage companies. This program could positively aid startup innovations and transform the way early-stage companies operate today. While most young companies are financially challenged to materialize their big ideas, they find it immensely difficult to find investors. If everything goes as planned, perhaps this program will help solve this problem by bringing startups and entrepreneurs face-to-face with investors and venture capitalists.

Through this program, IBM will offer up to $120,000 worth of IBM Cloud usage credits to qualifying startups as a move to fund innovations and to spark interesting collaborations between the startups and its own entrepreneurial community. Of late, IBM has been playing a proactive role in supporting innovation among new companies. In fact, this program is latest among its string of recent initiatives in this direction. For instance, last year IBM partnered with the City of New York to launch digital.NYC, a cloud-based resource for the NYC tech community, and also teamed up with Galvanize, a startup hub based in San Francisco, to create its first-ever BlueMix Garage – a collaborative space of developers to innovate new cloud applications.

This program will give enterprises a full-blown access to IBM’s cloud portfolio, which includes tools to evaluate social data leveraging IBM’s new Twitter partnership, Aspera’s high speed data transfer services, and Cloudant’s flexible Database-as-a-Service (DaaS). Not only this, startups will get up close and personal with IBM’s vast entrepreneurial client base through IBM-facilitated networking dinners, CIO and entrepreneur meetings, and other events across the globe. And, this personal networking is probably the best opportunity for startups and the entrepreneurial community to make those vital connections that often change the course of their fate.

As for the required tech support for the program, IBM will offer consulting and support through its global innovation centers, its new incubator space in Silicon Alley and its growing network of Bluemix Garages.

If there’s a maxim for today’s businesses, it most certainly is – the present and the future of successful business operation lies in leveraging the power of cloud. And, if this program turns out to be successful, IBM can proudly call itself the driving force behind this maxim.

Have startups found their holy grail in this IBM-led program? 

We’ll have to wait and watch. 

What do you think?

View at the original source