As a final salute to the new year, 2021, here’s a list of 10 companies that I ran into in 2020 or earlier and which I think will do well in 2021. In technology terms, it’s a mixed bag. The order of this list indicates nothing.
1. Pega Robotics. OpenSpan is development software aimed squarely at “the last mile” of SOA. It enables its users to link together functionality from just about anything, including desktop apps (such as Excel, Word), internet capabilities (Google Apps, Zoho, whatever) and web services (which means just about all other apps that have a web services interface. It has the potential to boost the advantages that SOA and/or BPM confer. (I haven’t provided a blog post for this product, but I will in the coming weeks).
2. DimDim. When I was briefed on this, primarily through a demonstration of DimDim’s capabilities, I quickly concluded that this product would quickly gain users. What is it? It is a free open source Webex-like capability. (For more details read Is This The End For Webex?). It was in beta when I was briefed but it is about to go into full release. I expect that some company (Google is the most likely) to buy DimDim as soon as it demonstrates an ability to attract large numbers of users.
3. Black Duck. Black Duck is audit software for source code. It can identify any source code that may have been stolen. It can tie source code back to the billions of lines of code in Open Source that is covered by various usage licenses, such as the GPL (see previous posting). It’s been 2 years since I was briefed by Black Duck, and in that time, the importance of what Black Duck does has become more compelling. With the advent of SOA and mash-ups, the need for this kind of software is more pressing. Black Duck occupies a tidy little niche.
4. QlikTech. My posting about QlikTech’s QlikView (Is this the Death of the Data Cube?) generated an unexpectedly large amount of traffic. Couple that with the fact that QlikTech is already growing quickly and you have a pretty good indicator of success for the QlikView product. QlikTech will either become a big BI vendor or will be snapped up by one of the existing giants.
5. Secure64. I mentioned Secure64 “en passant” in a posting I wrote on Cyberwarfare. Secure64 is in the business of providing a bullet-proof authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) server including both hardware and software. I looked into the technology in detail while writing a white paper on it. It’s about as secure as anything ever gets to be.
6. LignUp. Aside from Avaya, LignUp is the only company I’ve briefed with that has built a CEBP platform. It’s a small company in a market that I expect to grow large, and it appears to have established a growing customer base. Since building a CEBP platform is not a trivial undertaking, I expect LignUp to get acquired by one of the bigger players in the CEBP market (Nortel, Siemens, etc.). (There are some other start-ups in this area that I intend to look at this year).
7. Enterprise DB. This is a company I’ve been tracking for a while. It offers you the capability of cloning the Oracle database (including PL/SQL code) and replacing it with a version of Postgres built specially for Oracle compatibility. The upshot is that you pay a lot less for your database. It’s often hard to know whether a proposition of this kind will take hold, but with EnterpriseDB it clearly has. The company has acquired about 200 customers in about 3 years of trading, including some big names, such as Sony Online Entertainment, Sun, Vonage and FTD. Also it is growing dramatically. I expect the growth to continue apace.
8. Trigence. It was Trigence that provoked me to write this posting: To Virtualize The OS or To Virtualize The App? Trigence does app virtualization. It is going to take it a while to dent the current dash to OS virtualization, but I expect Trigence to more than hold its own as this market evolves.
9. StrikeIron. In early December 2007, I wrote Has StrikeIron Cracked the Mashup Market?. I think it has.
10. Kaspersky. Kaspersky is growing dramatically. It has a solid foundation in the EU market and a growing presence in the US. It is poised to diversify and its technologists are high class. This is a company to watch for many reasons (not least of which is their impending embrace of whitelisting)