This is simply a list of companies that I expect to do reasonably well this year. Given the economic climate, doing well might not mean out-and-out success. It may just reflect itself in healthy growth or acquisition, but at a price that doesn’t make the shareholders scream. Most of these companies are “new kids on the block”, but one or two of them are reasonably well established. They are all worth keeping an eye on.

1. Lexcycle: I discovered Lexcycle at the end of the year (see One Million Users: Is Stanza Killing The Kindle?) While it’s possible that this company may turn into just another iPhone App vendor, I think it unlikely. Lexcycle’s software, Stanza, with over a million users, has twice the customer base of Amazon’s Kindle and must be giving Amazon a serious headache. Stanza is a free download. The company makes its revenue from selling eBooks. So the question is: should Amazon abandon the Kindle before Stanza  achieves indisputable dominance in the sale of eBooks?
2. CoreTrace: There have been many entrants into the whitelisting/anti-malware market since Lumension (originally SecureWave) first validated the market. I’ve watched the market grow and chronicled the realization and acceptance by AntiVirus vendors that their technology is deficient and then the gradual embracing of whitelisting by Symantec, Kaspersky et al. I have been impressed by CoreTrace (see Bouncer: Going Beyond Whitelisting), a new entrant to the market, because it has the makings of a security platform rather than being a point product – and also because it shoots root kits stone dead.
3. Desktone: I can’t help but like Desktone’s cloud proposition. I had been writing about client virtualization extensively when I was briefed by Desktone and 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,  but all of the server side hardware can be in the cloud. (see Desktone: Client Virtualization in the Cloud) It minimizes the hassle of desktop virtualization and it must be tempting for data centers that have run out of space.
4. AppSense: In respect of virtualization, I was genuinely impressed by Environment Manager 8.0 from  AppSense. AppSense is already a well established company in revenue terms, and Environment Manager is the products that’s currently driving the business. What it delivers is “personalization virtualization” which is a complement (on the desktop) to OS virtualization and App virtualization. To get more detail read What is Personalization Virtualization?
5. Enterprise DB: This company has a business model to die for given the bad economic weather. It’s an Oracle replacement product, which can clone both the Oracle database and (this is the important point) PL/SQL code. It replaces Oracle with a version of Postgres built specially for Oracle compatibility. The result is a significant reduction in database license fees. If I ran an IT shop I’d implement Enterprise DB just to give me leverage when negotiating license fees with Oracle. Enterprise DB now has hundreds of users and is growing rapidly. The recession should help the company grow.
6. Pervasive Software: I was probably more impressed with Pervasive Software than any other company I came in contact with this year. Pervasive’s Data Junction technology has always been powerful, versatile and value for money, but the company seemed to flower last year, introducing 3 separate product initiatives all of which are impressive. The first was its data hub or as Pervasive calls it, their Data Mediation Service (see ETL and the Pervasive Advantage.) The second was its DataRush Parallel Dataflow Framework which adds sophisticated parallelism into the ETL mix and finally there was it’s impressive (and intelligent) move to deliver a metadata warehouse which I wrote about here. Pervasive may be a relatively small fish in a big pool, competing to some degree with the likes of IBM and Informatica, but it has clear technology leadership over its competitors in several areas.
7. Avocado Security: Avacado Security introduced what is, as far as I know, a new idea; that of video mining. Simply put, the idea is to analyze security video to extract useful textual information and then apply BI to that extracted information. It’s a powerful idea with implications that stretch way beyond security video streams. (See Video Mining: A Technology Whose Time Has Come)
8. Quintura: Quintura is one of the semantic technology products that I ran into last year. It’s actually Russian software and it uses semantic technology to enable more effective searches of web sites. You can see the capability on this web site (click here) although searching blogs isn’t really where the strength of the technology lies.  (The service is free to bloggers of course). It has proved very effective on ecommerce sites, primarily I think, because the tag cloud provides an effective route to where visitors actually wish to go. For more about Quintura read What is a Semantic Search Capability? Look See!
9. Coral8: I’ve been keeping an eye on streaming products, primarily because I believe that, in time, SOA will be superseded by a streaming architecture. This doesn’t mean that SOA will go away – more that a streaming architecture will be wrapped around SOA, and in doing that real-time business analysis will become a reality. Among the streaming vendors, Coral8 has impressed me partly because it thinks in a similar way to that – it refers to itself as the Continuous Intelligence company. I expect the growth in the use of streaming technology to continue until eventually it becomes mainstream.
10. Clearpace: I’ve picked Clearpace (a UK company initially) as an in-memory database company to watch. In-memory database products have not done as well as they should have, in recent years – but now is their time to shine. Clearpace’s NParchive applies fast in-memory technology to archiving in a way that saves huge amounts of disk space (and hence cost) and yet allows the data to be queried directly. The value proposition for the product is strong and the technology could easily be applied to other contexts. (See In-Memory Database – As Archiving Capability?)

Two other companies came to mind to include in this list, the database companies; Greenplum and Vertica. Both are in the very large query database business. What I couldn’t work out was whether that sector of the software market will grow in the coming year, although it always has done, so I guess it will even in this recession.