I am pleased to report that RiverMuse was a Judges Choice winner in the category of “Cloud Infrastructure Management” at the select “Under The Radar” event held in Mountain View, CA last week. RiverMuse was one of the 30 vibrant startups pre-selected to present its business case around cloud innovation.

The event attracted over 350 movers and shakers from the IT industry with a keen interest in all things ‘cloud’ this year. The presenting companies had 6 minutes to make their case in front of a panel of industry experts before answering questions from the judges and the audience. In addition to infrastructure management the cloud categories included a range of topical themes including noSQL data management systems, compliance, analytics, virtualization, communication, and app development and management.

The day’s events were fast paced, filled with energy, ideas and edge. The audience and the judges represented a good mix of enterprise and service provider IT executives, vendors, and other key stakeholders, looking for the new generation of cloud computing innovators. It was interesting to note the serious level of interest to adopt cloud techniques and technologies by large enterprises and established service providers.

Open minded yet stringent in their enterprise requirements, it became clear early in the day that the audience meant business and was looking for players with differentiated value proposition, a solid offering and a viable business model. It was also apparent that judges were interested in companies with the potential to target mainstream organizations, not just emerging and atypical web 2.0 businesses that still only represent a sliver of the IT spend but tend to eclipse the thousands of tried-and-true enterprises who have similar needs.

All in all, it was an awesome day to connect with genuine buyers and practitioners of cloud computing. And despite differences in style and pitch, the participants exuded similar traits in presenting their business: true cloud believers, relentless in their quest to solve real problems, true innovation, strong passion, and great agility.

Being recognized as the Judge’s Choice in our category also re-affirmed our belief that managing Cloud systems needs a complete rethinking of the management approach and a new architecture that is equally dynamic, automated and flexible as the monitored environment. RiverMuse is dedicated to doing just that – delivering service assurance for both cloud and virtualized datacenters and networks across all manner of service providers – inside and outside the enterprise.