The Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups

If there's one crowd of people who know about hot startups, it's the venture capitalists who fund them.

So we took an informal survey of a handful of top enterprise VCs to find out which startups they are most excited about.

But we gave them rules.

They could tell us about one or two companies in their own portfolios (seems fair, they liked them enough to fund them) but they also HAD TO tell us about an equal number of startups that neither they, nor their firms had a financial interest in.

We've indicated the relationship each VC has to the startup. "It's mine" indicates that the VC is either directly involved, or the company is a member of the firm's portfolio. 

The second category is "No relation. I just think it's cool." This indicates a startup outside of the VC's portfolio.

The total list shows just how diverse and exciting enterprise tech is these days. If you're looking for a company to bet your career on, to partner with, or to just to watch, these are the ones.

We contacted every startup and found out a few interesting facts about each one, too.

Cloudera: Bringing big data to any enterprise

Cloudera helps companies build big data systems using an open source technology known as Hadoop. Hadoop can analyze huge quantities of data using low-cost hardware and enterprises are eating it up.

Cloudera is one of the leaders in this area created by some Valley heavy hitters including ex-Facebook-er Jeff Hammerbacher; Yahoo's former VP engineering, Amr Awadallah.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners.  "The category leader in innovating and deploying Hadoop in enterprise."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: The inventor of Hadoop (and head guy at the Apache Foundation), Doug Cutting, works for Cloudera.

Nimble Storage: Making storage faster, greener

Flash storage is changing how companies can store data -- making it faster and using less energy. It's the same type of storage used in in a thumb drive or in mobile phones. Nimble Storage is helping to create enterprise flash storage for "post PC" devices (also known as virtualization).

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners."Nimble has developed an innovative file system that leverages the best of flash and disk natively for mainstream enterprise applications."

And watched by: Jim Goetz, Sequoia. "The emerging storage leader."

Relationship to these VCs: "It's mine."

Fun fact: After EMC shot a promotional video of a stunt motorcyclist jumping over the entire EMC line of 40 storage products, Nimble Storage CTO Umesh Maheshwari did the same with a mountain bike over a single Nimble Storage array. 

Platfora: Making big data easy to use for everyone

Once a company builds its complicated Hadoop big data app, Platfora offers technology that lets average business users work with the app. The company is still in stealth, and isn't launching the product until Q4. But enterprises have been hearing about it and have overwhelmed the company with requests to join its beta program.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners. "A data visualization/discovery application built on top of big data platforms like Hadoop. It allows enterprises to extract value out of all their big data plaforms."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The office lobby features glowing blue highlights and others in the building at first thought the it was a nightclub.

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