The selection process for our roundup of 10 data-center virtualization startups to watch began with 33 recommendations and nominations that were sent via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribers to the Startup50 email newsletter.
Several of those startups had to be eliminated right off the bat not because they wouldn’t be a good fit for this roundup – they would be – but because they had already been covered in previous roundups, including those focused on storage, hybrid cloud and business continuity.
From the nominations and recommendations, roughly a dozen startups were cut due to lack of funding, lack of named customers, weak leadership teams, and/or incomplete, vague or misleading answers to questions about their businesses.
The 10 startups featured in this roundup were a good fit based on the upside of their market niche, positioning within that niche, the value proposition of their products or services, product-market fit, the strength of the leadership teams and named customers.
Based on the evaluation criteria, every single one of the 10 startups featured has the potential to drive the next big wave of data-center virtualization, from servers to storage to load balancing, all the way up to layer 7.