DEMOfall: Enablers and Sea-Changers

All of the user-facing magic can’t scale without the right infrastructure. These companies are addressing innovative ways to make the “back-end” operations of the network more robust:

• Jasper Wireless: Everywhere around you, machines are talking to each other. Jasper has created the Global M2M (machine to machine) Wireless Service to facilitate communications between machines. Take the cononical example of the net-enabled refrigerator talking to the grocery store order entry system to get more milk delivered when the freshness expiration date is reached and magnify that by an order of magnitude. Jasper’s service works in 35 countries, is operated via a web control panel, and uses a single SIM card design to connect all of these devices – over 6 billion connected machines by the company’s measurement.
• Talari Networks, Inc.: Talari Networks T700 does for WANs what RAID did for storage – reduced cost, increased capacity, and easier and more reliable installation and operations. But, as the company’s CEO admitted on stage, demoing network infrastructure is pretty hard to do and so he very nicely focuses instead on using his six minutes on stage to put the value of the solution they’ve developed in context to things that are probably better understood – like RAID storage compared to massive storage systems.
• Propel Software Corporation: Propel has created something they call PBM (Personal Bandwidth Management). It analyzes the type of applications you use that currently compete for bandwidth (like Skype, file transfer applications, etc.) and creates a dynamic and intelligent management profile to optimize the performance of all concurrently running applications. As more of our work (and play) moves to the cloud, this can be asoluion that provides real value to “mere mortals” as the company’s CEO put it. The demo looked very simple and well designed for non-technical users.
• Fusion-io: I was excited to learn the this company would be at DEMOfall. Real breakthroughs in storage may not sound terribly sexy but anyone who’s gne for a single hard drive to a RAID or SAN environment knows how big a bang high-performance storage can deliver. In the demo, ioMemory and the ioDrive moved 8 DVDs of information in about 40 seconds. The company claims their solution is 1000 times faster than conventional hard drive technologies and used a great visual - a huge pillar of hard drives compared to a single PCI card to drive the point home. I’m not sure they made it entirely clear how this works but we’ll visit them in the Pavilion to try to learn more.
• Qumranet: The company is announcing a designed-for-the-desktop virtualization product called Solid ICE that allows for quick self-provisioning of desktop installations that all run on central server but deliver similar performance to local installations. From the demo, it appears that defining standard “templates” for common configurations is easy enough and an end user can literally “build” their own system to meet their needs from a simple user interface. Like all virtualization schemes, this makes central management and maintenance easier for the IT department.
• Phreesia, Inc.: Revolutionizing the doctor’s waiting room by providing a slate form factor device to automate the process of signing in using a touchscreen or magnetic card swiper. My son’s orthodontist has something like this in their office. Phreesia offers a network to heslth care providers using their hardware so that information entered by the patient or care provider can be shared. Interestingly, the company provides the technology to participating physicians free of charge. Everything is HIPPA-compliant and personal information is accessible only by the individual and the health care providers they authorize. An information portal with sponsored content is accessible (hinting at one compnent in the business model).
• LogMeIn, Inc.: LogMeIn has 25 million registered users of their remote access solutions. Rescue + Mobile extends this capability to smartphones and allows users of those devices to access and control a remote PC. The implications for technical support are profound. A small application is installed on the mobile device using OTA (over the air) using the phone’s browser with no configuration required. Permissions are granted by the mobile device user to allow the remote user to access and control a variety of functions. As mobile devices are rolled out in more organizations, being able to provide this kind of remote support can contain costs and improve support quality and time in a big way. This was a very impressive demo.