Last week, European journalists were invited to various US technology hubs to meet with some of the most exciting and innovative companies currently operating in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and further afield.
The fourth and final day of the tour took the group to central San Francisco, with the contrasting environments of start-ups Jut, CoreOS and Avere Systems finishing off the trip. Here are the highlights:
Jut
VP of products and marketing, Apurva Dave, and founder and CEO Steve McCanne, told the group about their start-up Jut, a streaming data analytics platform founded in 2013.
Supporting the idea behind the business, Dave pointed to all of the companies now becoming software companies, and therefore becoming data companies in turn. This trend increases the demand for a unified analytics platform that's sophisticated enough yet simple enough for a wide range of businesses to use, he believes.
With businesses simply buying off-the-shelf solutions for each area, he says this results in silos of data, making correlation very difficult if not impossible. If a company chooses to build their own analytics platform then they're stuck with it, and small changes require extra development time they may not have.
Instead, Jut offers a unified view and flexible analytics, allowing the user to merge real time analysis with historical data in one single platform. It's a mix between Google Dataflow and Tableau, the representatives tell the group.
The company has even created its own dataflow language Juttle allowing users to focus on the answer they want, rather than how they're going to get it, eliminating the need for low level programming languages.
CoreOS
Fully embracing the start-up stereotype, our meeting with CoreOS takes place in the basement of their offices in San Francisco, where we're informed that the company has grown from around 14 people to 40 people within a year, moving from a garage in Palo Alto to their current location.
Founded in 2013 by CEO Alex Polvi, CoreOS launched its first commercial product, Managed Linux, the following year before the full Tectonic platform in April 2014.
Billed as "Google infrastructure in a box" for enterprise, the open source Tectonic bundle includes CoreOS, rkt and etcd, available to companies building their own full infrastructure a piece at a time.
Its aim is to provide "dynamic elastic computer environments" to companies that aren't Google employing the hashtag #gifee (Google infrastructure for everyone else).
The story behind our modest surroundings comes last, with Polvi explaining that they are intentionally under-capitalised to reduce rash decision making, but that the industry has become so dynamic that start-ups can now create the technology needed to define the future ahead of big companies.
Avere Systems
Avere Systems, our last stop on the tour, is all about "reinventing storage" with a hybrid cloud solution that integrates public and private object storage with legacy NAS into a single, cost-effective pool, providing scalable performance for users on-premises and in the cloud.
All of this is designed to tackle the rapidly rising level of unstructured data brought about by IoT and other innovations in the "cloud era", while also halting the cost and complexity of storage for that data among companies deploying their Avere Cloud NAS solution.
Offering a specific example of how their systems are being used across various industries including government, media, life sciences and software dev, the top 12 (US) grossing movies of 2014 used AOS 1.0 for special effects, and 4 out of 8 of the largest tech companies run mission-critical applications on Avere.
