Meet our 10 finalists for the CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown

Our first annual CloudBeat 2011 conference is fast approaching! Today we are extremely happy to announce our finalists for the conference’s Innovation Showdown, a battle between 10 companies that are each making big waves with unique cloud technologies.

In these 10 finalists, we were looking for companies with products that are using the cloud in a disruptive way. The more revolutionary the company’s idea, the the better its chances. Nominations included startups as well as established companies with brilliant new ideas.

Live at CloudBeat 2011, finalists will have four minutes to showcase their products or services. Our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide feedback on the 10 products or services presented, and determine one winner.

The Showdown winner will be announced onstage and will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes yet to be announced. All 10 finalists have also been invited to attend a special Bootcamp session hosted by Sequoia Capital, taking place at Sequoia’s offices in Menlo Park this Friday.

Without further ado, here are the 10 Innovation Showdown finalists:

GigaSpaces Technologies

Gigaspaces is part of a new generation of application virtualization platforms and a leading provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies. GigaSpaces’ big solutions are XAP Elastic Application Platform and Cloudify. Cloudify enables the deployment of any app with any stack on any cloud without any code changes.

myERP.com

myERP.com is an incredibly fast-growing all-one-one business cloud application and one of the most popular apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. The myERP.com app helps small and mid-size businesses leaders run a business with tools for accounting, CRM, purchasing, inventory and more.

OfficeDrop

OfficeDrop is a popular cloud-based document scanning and document management solution that provides small businesses with affordable ways to manage their paper and digital files. The company converts paper and digital files into text-searchable documents, and has recently begun focusing on mobile, web and desktop scan-to-cloud apps.

Oxygen Cloud

Oxygen Cloud enables companies to create private storage clouds that provide secure, anywhere, any device access to all corporate files. Oxygen replaces old-school network drives mapped to old file servers with a Universal Cloud Drive synchronizing access to shared files in the cloud.

Talkdesk

Talkdesk lets customers bring their call center to the cloud and eliminates the overhead associated with traditional call centers. Typically, only large companies have the resources to do call centers and associated management properly. Talkdesk lets you act like a big company but without long-term contracts or infrastructure costs because it is in the cloud.

VeaMea

VeaMea provides cloud-based video conferencing and collaboration tools that connect the desktop to the board room over existing IP networks.

VirtualSharp

VirtualSharp offers its customers disaster recovery solutions for virtual data centers. The company’s next-gen disaster recovery can help control private and public clouds. Its software makes possible new levels of resiliency for virtual IT infrastructure and full alignment between IT disaster recovery and corporate business continuity planning.

Visier

Visier builds workforce analytics applications that help with and streamline human resource management. The company’s cloud apps, in one major example, optimize the largest expenses for organizations across all industries.

Xiimo

Xiimo’s free marketing platform enables small businesses across global markets to publish local promotions, accept mobile payments, launch loyalty programs and leverage smart analytics.

Zadara Storage

Zadara provides its customers with virtual private storage arrays within public clouds with the privacy, control and performance associated with standard enterprise-class storage arrays.

We wish the best of luck to all of these great finalists, and may the best one win! See the Showdown live, as part of an information-packed two days that will offer actionable lessons and great networking opportunities. Grab your CloudBeat 2011 ticket today. Spots are extremely limited!

Storm clouds photo via MAMJODH

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!