Introduction
The 451 Firestarter awardees in the third quarter of 2019 consist of large and small technology firms who 451 Research analysts believe are disrupting and innovating in their given fields. The focus of the recipients range s from collaboration and customer relationship management to network infrastructure, computational storage and more. We are proud to recognize the impact that these thirteen disruptors are making in their respective markets.
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Recipients of the Q3 2019 451 Research Firestarter Awards (in alphabetical order)
Nominated by Raul Castanon-Martinez, Senior Analyst, Workforce Collaboration and Communications
Cisco Collaboration has received a Q3 Firestarter Award for its innovative approach to Cognitive Collaboration, with AI-enabled capabilities that build intelligence and context awareness across its portfolio including its unified communications as a service, contact center, devices and cloud-connected offerings.
K2View (Fabric)
Nominated by Paige Bartley, Senior Analyst, Data Management
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In 2017, NGD shipped its first generation of devices, which featured FPGA controllers. This year the company began shipping second-generation devices whose controllers are based on an ASIC designed by NGD. These are the only computational storage drives on the market that are entirely ASIC-powered, and NGD’s very few rivals in this sector remain committed to FPGA-based controllers that do not host third-party software. The switch to an ASIC has also increased the data capacity and throughput of the drives, while heavily reducing costs and power consumption compared to the previous FPGA-powered devices. Even when compared to conventional, non-computational drives, NGD claims market-leading qualities for its drives.
Nominated by Carl Lehmann, Principal Analyst, Applied Infrastructure & DevOps
Nominated by Mike Fratto, Senior Analyst, Applied Infrastructure and DevOps
Nubeva launched its Prisms packet capture product in September 2018. Prisms is a cloud-managed agent designed to acquire, filter and forward network traffic to security and analytics products for deeper analysis. Prisms TLS Decrypt and its Prisms cloud native network tap product make it a good acquisition target for companies in the APM, NPM, and security verticals that want a cloud native packet capture. Prisms TLS Decrypt is patent pending and available on a subscription basis. The company is considering it for an OEM in the future.
Nominated by Sheryl Kingstone, Research Vice President & General Manager - VOCUL
The company has raised $100m in funding thus far, with the most recent being a $60m round led by Iconiq, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. In order to establish itself as a more credible player in the market, People.ai plans to use the funding to expand commercial operations and customer acquisition, as well as boost data science and engineering initiatives companywide.
Nominated by Jean Atelsek, Analyst, Cloud Transformation and Digital Economics Unit
More about Rancher Labs – Rancher sees Kubernetes as quickly emerging from the domain of do-it-yourself innovators into large-scale enterprise production, and it has built out a suite of software that caters to developers as well as central IT departments. The company now delivers a full-stack portfolio including its flagship Rancher container management platform, RKE (a full-featured Kubernetes distribution), k3s (a lightweight distribution), Submariner (for cross-cluster network connectivity), Longhorn (distributed block storage) and Rio (a microPaaS for Kubernetes). The idea is to wrangle a variety of enterprise implementations, including managed Kubernetes platforms offered by AWS, Azure and Google under one umbrella for unified IT operations.
Salesforce.com (myTrailhead)
Nominated by Conner Forrest, Analyst, Workforce Productivity and Compliance
Salesforce’s myTrailhead, launched in March 2019, has earned the company a Q3 2019 451 Firestarter award based on its extension of the original Trailhead platform in a manner that more broadly tackles the challenges enterprises face with traditional learning management system (LMS) software. By providing a customizable learning model that promotes continuous upskilling through gamification and badging, myTrailhead addresses the lack of personalization and contextualization in many LMS products, while also leveraging analytics to measure adoption and skill proficiency. These features could help companies take a more modern approach to organizational planning while increasing internal mobility/recruiting and boosting employee engagement as well.
Our take – Investing in a modern learning and development strategy can improve overall productivity, increase the number of available skills within an organization and improve employee engagement. However, traditional learning management system (LMS) offerings have struggled to offer the level of personalization and contextualization necessary for today’s workforce. Salesforce’s myTrailhead, launched in March 2019, is a learning experience platform (LXP) that addresses these challenges with a customizable learning model that promotes continuous upskilling through gamification and badging.
More about Salesforce myTrailhead – The initiative builds on the original Trailhead platform (that focused mostly on Salesforce-specific skills) but expands the concept to include more room for custom content and relevant skills. Analytics capabilities, like those offered through the Trail Tracker app, help managers get a clearer picture of how training is being adopted; and the badging system certifies an employee’s proficiency in a certain skill.
These features could help companies take a more modern approach to organizational planning while increasing internal mobility/recruiting and increasing employee engagement as well.
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Signal Sciences
Nominated by Scott Crawford, Research Vice President, Information Security
Signal Sciences has adroitly adapted the web application firewall (WAF) for a hybrid IT world, creating a software based onsite and SaaS based delivery of web application protection with a variety of implementation options in a space historically dominated by network appliances.
Our take – Founded in 2014 by former security professionals at Etsy who were seeking to solve application security issues at scale there, Signal Sciences offers a next generation Web Application Firewall (WAF), that seeks to move away from legacy WAF approaches that were often pushed forward only by compliance mandates such as PCI, and were due to accuracy issues often run with minimum blocking rules in place. Signal Sciences asserts that 95% of customers are running the product in full automated blocking mode.
Signal Sciences is more than a traditional WAF, however. Architecturally, it is SaaS-based, leveraging a cloud-based engine that uses collective intelligence gathered from the company’s universe of customers. At the protected application, a number of deployment options are available including on the application’s web server, from within the application, as a reverse proxy, or most recently as a hosted cloud WAF via a DNS change. Full feature parity is maintained between deployment options, and more importantly all feed into the same management console, a key security operations concern in what are increasingly hybrid environments featuring an application footprint both on-premises and in multiple clouds.
More about Signal Sciences – Signal Sciences raised a $35mm C round in February, in addition to the $26.7mm raised prior to that. The firm has 115 employees as of last count, more than double the prior year, and earned $15mm in revenue per 451’s private company estimates in 2018, with a $30mm target in 2019. Customers include firms like Adobe, WeWork, and Under Armour.
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Silverfort
Nominated by Garrett Bekker, Principal Security Analyst, Information Security
451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) data shows that despite the limitations of traditional passwords, just 53% of enterprises have implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA), largely due to a poor experience for users, admins and developers. Adaptive authentication platform provider Silverfort has earned a Q3 2019 451 Firestarter award based on its ability to deliver strong authentication to any application, user, device, resource or system without installing an agent or in-line gateway, and without modifying applications or user behavior. Silverfort’s ‘any-to-any’ authentication framework can also allow firms to pursue a Zero Trust security strategy without making extensive changes to their existing environments.
Our take – Israel-based startup Silverfort offers an authentication platform that can deliver strong authentication to any application, user, device, resource or system, across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. More importantly, the company can accomplish this without making any changes to client devices or applications or requiring any modifications to user behavior, and also without installing an agent or in-line gateway. VoTE data shows MFA adoption at just north of 50%, which could provide a notable opportunity for Silverfort.
More about Silverfort – Silverfort was founded in 2016 by CEO Hed Kovetz, president Matan Fattal and CTO Yaron Kassner, each of whom previously served in the highly regarded 8200 cybersecurity unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. Leonid Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of Viewfinity (acquired by CyberArk in 2015 for $30.5m in cash), serves as executive chairman and VP of business development. Silverfort maintains its current headquarters in Tel Aviv and has a US office in Boston. Silverfort has raised a total of $14m from TLV Partners, StageOne Ventures and Singtel Innov8 (Singtel's VC arm). Silverfort has formal strategic partnerships with Okta, Microsoft, Cyber Ark, Check Point and Palo Alto Networks.
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Syntiant
Nominated by John Abbott, Founder & Distinguished Analyst, 4SIGHT
A Q3 2019 451 Firestarter award has been awarded to Syntiant, one of the players in the increasingly crowded sector of silicon accelerators for new generation workloads, most notably artificial intelligence. What differentiates Syntiant are the backing of some serious strategic investors, and its focus on ultra-low power applications. While many of its competitors have tried to scale down power-hungry general-purpose architectures such as CPUs and GPUs, Syntiant designed its parts from scratch for maximum efficiency, to support new levels of intelligence within battery powered and energy harvesting edge devices.
Our take – Syntiant has taken something of a different path from most of the other new entrants into the fast-growing sector of AI accelerators. Its neural decision processors (NDPs) are aimed at always-on battery-powered voice and sensor devices where power efficiency has to be in the microwatt range. By designing from the ground up and focusing on memory rather than logic, on massively parallel processing, and on modest rather than high precision, Syntiant claims that it can achieve approximately 100 times efficiency improvements and faster performance compared with stored program architectures such as CPUs and digital signal processors (DSPs).
More about Syntiant – Founded in 2017, Irvine, California-based Syntiant has raised $30m in funding from mostly strategic investors, including Amazon, Applied Materials, Bosch, Intel, Microsoft and Motorola Solutions. It’s already sampling its first two neural decision processor chips: the NDP100 and NDP101, both microwatt-power devices designed to run deep learning algorithms at the edge. The first production parts should be out this summer. The key to its strategy is its concentration on optimizing multiply-accumulate operations as close to the memory as it can, without the expensive and power-sipping baggage of chips that have been scaled down from more general-purpose architectures such as CPUs and GPUs. However, this is only an interim step, designed to get it to market more rapidly. The vendor is working on even more efficient processors for future release that use analog computational techniques within flash memory, and that's where its real future lies.
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Turbot
Nominated by Fernando Montenegro, Principal Analyst, Information Security
Turbot has earned a Q3 2019 451 Firestarter award based on its governance platform for cloud deployments. Many organizations are facing the need to evolve traditional IT practices – service catalogs, IT-provisioned infrastructure – into a cloud-centric approach that values agility and freedom, but to do so without losing control. By providing a platform that integrates into different cloud environments and other SaaS offerings while offering a platform-agnostic management layer, Turbot addresses the needs of cloud development teams as well as management concerns for security, governance and cost control. Turbot's offering could help companies tackle the balance needed between maintaining compliance and control over sprawling cloud resources while allowing teams to continue to pursue innovation at a much faster pace.
Our take – One of the more profound changes that cloud brings to modern IT is the existence of built-in security controls, but those controls are almost always centered on a provider’s own offerings. Organizations need an effective mechanism that can take corporate policies and translate those into the specific details of each environment. Turbot offers this in an elegant and extensible manner, making it well-suited as an example of how third-party security vendors can offer value in the face of increasingly capable built-in security features.
More about Pluralsight – Turbot was founded in 2014 by CEO Nathan Wallace, and is self-funded. Wallace’s previous experience is centered around his time at Johnson & Johnson, where he was an executive leading the company’s Cloud Service and DevOps efforts. The company currently has approximately 50 employees spread across the United States, India, Australia, and the UK.
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About 4SIGHT
All organizations are finding themselves navigating a challenging and changing digital transformation landscape. It's hard to know what path to take and which obstacles to tackle first. In this new world, it's very easy to fall into one-size-fits-all guidance, but an oversimplified model can't address the unique aspects, skills, assets and expectations of your organization. What is really needed is a frame of reference to start more specific conversations. That's where 4SIGHT comes in.
We've built this framework to bring some clarity to the digital transformation landscape, and to help companies plan for the future in ways that fit their situation and aspirations. Organizations can expand the context of these scenarios to prepare for a wider range of outcomes.
We've grouped 4SIGHT into four areas. Like the real world, they're not distinct, and there is considerable overlap between them. They're not fixed, either. That's by design – it's a living framework that we'll update with new information, course-correcting as the future unfolds. But it does provide a critical starting point for the deeper discussions that all organizations need to have about changes in technology today.
Fernando is a Senior Analyst on the Information Security team, based in Toronto. He has broad experience in security architecture, particularly network security for enterprise environments. He currently focuses on covering vendors and industry events in the endpoint security and cloud security spaces.
Jeremy Korn is a Research Associate at 451 Research. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Biology and East Asian Studies and received
Aaron Sherrill is a Senior Analyst for 451 Research covering emerging trends, innovation