It’s been a little more than six months since I provided a list of 10 IT companies to track for 2008. In that time I’ve had sufficient technology briefings and business interactions to create another such list. The implication of a company making it onto this list is either that it or its technology will, in my opinion, make an impact in the next 12 months or so. Here’s the list, in no particular order:

1. CoreTrace: There have been many entrants into the whitelisting/anti-malware market since Lumension (originally SecureWave) first validated the market. I have watched the market grow and chronicled the gradual realization and acceptance by AntiVirus vendors that their technology is deficient and the gradual move by Symantec, Kaspersky et al, to embrace whitelisting. Of the new entrants into this market, I was deeply impressed by CoreTrace (see Going Beyond Whitelisting) because it had the makings of a security platform rather than being a point product – and also because it shoots root kits stone dead.

2. Twitter: Twitter needs no introduction, it being the new “new new thing” on the Internet, to the point where it now gets mentioned en passant in the main stream media. Nevertheless many commentators are still uncertain where it is just another fad, like the hula hoop and the Rubik’s cube, or whether it’s got commercial legs. I belong in the commercial legs camp (see Ten Reasons Why Twitter Rocks), partly because I use it a fair amount. And despite the growing problems it has had (frequent outages), the number of users just keeps on rising.

3. Bungee: If your looking for new start-ups that might be successful, then keep your eyes on “the cloud”. Bungee almost counts as a case study in cloud computing plays, because it takes a complete charge by usage approach to garnering revenue from its development software (see the article). It’s in what I regard as the toughest market of all. Selling development software is really tough in a world where a whole swathe of Open Source development capabilities can be had for nothing. Bungee offers full life cycle tools, which are free to use. You just pay for the application when it runs, by usage.

4. Desktone: Speaking of the cloud, Desktone also has an interesting cloud proposition. I had been writing about client virtualization extensively and when I was briefed by Desktone, I was surprised by how fast a cloud-based client virtualization proposition had appeared. With Desktone you have thin clients on the desktop and control of client virtualization from the data center, (see posting) but all of the server side hardware can be in the cloud. A nice idea for data centers that have run out of space.

5. Expert System (Cogito): I have been following semantic technology forever, waiting for something to happen that actually delivered a capability that truly could extract meaning. I’ve seen an awful lot of disappointing technology in this space. Expert System’s Cogito product is the first I’ve seen that actually brings home the bacon and can make contextual sense out of the use of phrases like, well “brings home the bacon”. For more fun and information read my take on it.

6. Citrix: Big companies in with entrenched market positions are rarely the ones to innovate. They usually get all precious about their market and consequently get completely sideswiped by some disruptive technology. So it impresses me when a company does exactly the opposite and rises to meet the challenge. This is what Citrix has done with its desktop virtualization technology. (see post.) The challenge comes from VMware, which was threatening to eat Citrix for breakfast. Well not this time. Now the boot is on the other foot.

7. Protecode: Protecode had a fairly obvious idea, but like a lot of good ideas, it’s obvious only in retrospect. The time to check whether you’re likely to violate a software license is when you’re including someone else’s code in code you’re writing – not after it’s written. You really don’t want to suddenly discover you need to rewrite bits of a program because you violated someone’s GPL. For more on this see the posting

8. Avocado Security: If you follow my blog regularly you will have read about this a few days ago when I posted Video Mining. The idea here is to analyze security video to extract useful textual information and then apply BI to that extracted information. It’s a very powerful idea with implications that stretch way beyond security video streams.

9. aCelera: Truth to tell, I had been expecting the appliance to die for a while – once data centers became concerned about space. the story here is “the appliance is dead, long live the virtual appliance”. ACelera was the first company I ran in to that took this approach. (see The Death of the Appliance). What does aCelera do. It’s virtual appliance reduces WAN latency using a 3 step compression approach. Either you need that or you don’t. If you do, better to have it on a virtual appliance. Imho, all appliances will head in this direction soon.

10. Vertica: At last something genuinely new in the database world. Not much dramatic has happened since Enterprise DB cloned Oracle using PostgreSQL. Well Vertica is new, or at least kinda new, because technically it’s employing a whole series of performance techniques that have been used before, but not together (see posting.) What Vertica is doing that is really different is offering to run  big data warehouses in the cloud. That’s dramatic. It’s especially disruptive given that the price is low and the cost of data warehouses is not.

They say that VCs only need to have about 1 in 10 success when investing in startups. In general, one needs to be a big success, one needs to be half a success (i.e. it makes a genuine return on the investment but is not stellar) and the other 8 can fail. There may be some return from selling off the assets. In these selections which I do I’m not really looking for financial success, I ‘m looking for game-changing ideas – either from the technology or from the business model.

Nevertheless that usually confers success. Of the last list of 10 companies (see 10 IT Companies To Watch in 2008) at least 7 are prospering. Clearly by the time I get to know about a company, it’s already got some legs.