What's become of 2008's 10 IT management start-ups to watch, Part 1

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

The economy didn’t give many companies much room to grow in the past year, but the 10 IT management start-ups recognized in 2008 as ones to watch managed to make a name and some money for themselves.

10 IT management technology start-ups to watch – 2009

10 technologies from 2009’s IT management start-ups to watch

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The economy didn’t give many companies much room to grow in the past year, but the 10 IT management start-ups recognized in 2008 as ones to watch managed to make a name and some money for themselves.

10 IT management technology start-ups to watch – 2009

10 technologies from 2009’s IT management start-ups to watch

Here is a brief look at what 2008’s IT management start-ups to watch accomplished since landing on Network World’s list.

AppDNA

Why it made the list: Founded in early 2008, AppDNA delivered its AppTitude technology that the London and Chicago-based vendor promised would help enterprise IT assess application version, operating system and virtualization options before an application is deployed to a production environment. Industry watchers at the time said this type of capability would be welcome for those adopting virtualization, especially on the client side.

"People are trying to determine what the best delivery vehicle is for end-user applications. AppDNA checks dependencies and application attributes to gauge if an application would be suited to a Citrix thin client application, for instance," said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner.

Highlights from the last year: In 2009, AppDNA released AppTitude 4.0, which includes Windows 7 reporting, but perhaps more notable, the company signed “Global Framework Licensing agreements” with both Microsoft and Citrix. The deal makes AppTitude the “application compatibility testing tool for both organizations,” an AppDNA spokeswoman says.

Apptio

Why it made the list: Apptio promised to provide transparency to IT costs, something high-tech leaders would need in a recession. But also industry watchers said such IT capacity planning, chargeback and cost management technologies – such as those available with Apptio’s Transparency Engine technology -- would play a pivotal role in larger efforts to manage IT costs in line with business demand.

"Globalization, consumerization, new competitors and new service models are radically changing the shape of IT. IT leaders must develop greater transparency into the costs, utilization and operations of their IT services," said Barbara Gomolski, research vice president at Gartner, in 2008.

Highlights from the last year: Not only did Apptio land on Gartner’s cool vendor list, the company also secured a $14 million round of funding in August 2009 from investors including Andreessen Horowitz Duns, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures. In terms of technology, Apptio introduced a Server Virtualization Cost Transparency offering to help IT and finance teams evaluate and accelerate expanded virtualization deployments and a Cloud Cost Transparency template to help IT teams analyze the return on investment of adoption cloud services as well as assess the cost as part of overall IT spend.

BlueStripe Software

Why it made the list: BlueStripe executives saw the need for application performance management software that works in virtual environments and its FactFinder product is able to discover applications and their components and benchmark normal behavior, making it that much easier for IT managers to spot performance anomalies.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.