Gartner Announces Cool Vendors in Emerging Trends and Technologies for 2005

Gartner announces cool vendors

Stamford: Gartner, Inc. has highlighted seven technology providers it calls "Cool Vendors" that are developing innovative products to address the challenges from increasing complexity of technologies.

According to Gartner research vice president and "Cool Vendors" lead Gartner analyst Anne-Marie Roussel, these technology providers are "small companies that offer technologies or products with three key characteristics — innovative, impactful and intriguing.”

In the Gartner report "Cool Vendors in Emerging Trends and Technologies, 2005," Gartner analysts identify three vendors that have developed sensor and location technologies, while others have built systems for debugging software and products for the life sciences market.

XenSource, a new software company formed to promote the Xen hypervisor, is possibly Microsoft's greatest challenge, Gartner says. The hypervisor is a thin layer of software that runs at the hardware level of a system. This thin layer of open source software allows for operating systems to run on top of it, thus fully emulating the system platform and thereby allowing multiple operating environments to run in parallel on a single system.

"XenSource's technology threatens to loosen Microsoft's grip on the PC market, and open up the PC for non-MS software that runs in conjunction with Windows," said Martin Reynolds, group vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Hypervisors will pervade all computing environments during the next five years, improving security, flexibility, and manageability," he added.

Companies like Exavera Technologies, Dust Networks and Impinji have technologies important to the development of sensor networks and location technologies. "Sensor networks will drive the number of network-connected devices up by one or two orders of magnitude during the next decade," Reynolds said. "The companies are all developing intellectual property and market segments that will naturally draw them to location-aware networks."

ZealCore is a company that has tools that can assist in debugging complex software environments. These tools are important when implementing service-oriented architectures. Gartner analysts said these new architectures will be needed to deal with the data provided by sensor network.

Other companies include Teranode, which applies design automation to life sciences, Clairvoyante that has innovative display technologies that can deliver more visual information at lower costs, improving the ways in which people interact with computers.