These cloud-native startups are redefining familiar technology and enabling entirely new products.
The global pandemic may have put a damper on many sectors of the economy, but it doesn’t seem to have hindered the cloud computing market. According to the latest forecast from Gartner, the public cloud market will likely grow 6.4% in 2020 to reach $242.7 billion. Software as a service (SaaS) is particularly strong, accounting for $104.7 billion of that total.
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In a 2020 InformationWeek/Interop survey, IT leaders estimated that 42% of their cloud-related budgets are going to SaaS initiatives.
The 2020 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera found that nearly all enterprises and small businesses are using some form of cloud computing. Of those surveyed, 96% were using public cloud services and 76% had a private cloud.
As cloud computing has become the norm, the trend has given birth to a huge number of startups that rely on the cloud. These “cloud-native” companies have challenged older, more established firms by finding new ways to do things more efficiently and cost effectively than ever before. And these exciting new business models have attracted a lot of investment, in many cases in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
InformationWeek has put together a list of 10 of these cloud startups that are particularly significant. In order to be considered for this list, a startup had to be founded in 2015 or later, and it had to offer a cloud-related product or service that seemed particularly noteworthy. The pool of candidates came from those cloud computing startups that had raised the most funding, as reported by Crunchbase, and the startups are listed in the order of the amount of funding they have received.
Several of these firms combine other hot trends with cloud computing. For example, some have products and services related to the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, and robotics. Others are putting a cloud twist on familiar aspects of IT, such as backup, networking, security, and databases. But they all share a focus on the cloud, and all seem to have a bright future ahead of them.
This slideshow offers a view into how some young companies are innovating with help from the cloud.
Cynthia Harvey is a freelance writer and editor based in the Detroit area. She has been covering the technology industry for more than fifteen years. View Full Bio
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