Meet our 7 finalists for the CloudBeat 2012 Innovation Showdown

Our second annual CloudBeat 2012 conference is just around the corner! Today we are extremely excited to announce our finalists for the event’s Innovation Showdown, a lively competition where seven new companies (chosen from over 200 nominees) will battle it out onstage to see whose product or service is leveraging the cloud in the most revolutionary way.

The finalists will have five minutes to pitch, and our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide detailed feedback and ultimately determine a winner.

We’ll announce the Showdown winner onstage at CloudBeat (Nov. 28-29, Redwood City, Calif.). In addition to the onstage accolades, the winner will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and relevant potential customers in our network, and a handful of other prizes to be announced.

Last year’s winner, Zadara Storage, went on to raise $7 million in first-round funding.

Without further ado, here are our 2012 Innovation Showdown finalists:

Kabbage

Kabbage has developed a technological platform to analyze seller data and advance cash on the spot. The internet-based funding platform enables small businesses to receive approval and funds within 7 minutes of completing a simple online application — a process that would normally require months of hassle and paperwork when applying for traditional funding through a bank. This data is pulled from sources such as PayPal, UPS, Intuit, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. All of this is stored and processed in the cloud, making the product fast, efficient, secure, and capable of scaling.

Appsecute

Appsecute bridges the divide between developers and IT operations, delivering collaborative management tools for PaaS. The company provides application management for the cloud, with an emphasis on transitioning applications into production. It’s like RightScale for PaaS.

Fiverun

Fiverun provides a tablet solution that helps retailers provide advice/recommendations and checkout customers, anywhere in a store with any sales associate. The company believes consumers should first be helped by a sales associate that is armed with a device that has every product the retailer carries. Fiverun leverages the power of its cloud based platform to power this functionality as a SaaS based solution for any retailer on the globe.

MuleSoft

Founded on the idea that connecting applications should not be hard, MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration. The company provides one of the most widely used integration platforms for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. Customers include Zynga, Boeing and Bank of America.

Cloudessa

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based solution for budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis, sales planning, data visualization, and business intelligence. It works with companies and nonprofits of all sizes to fundamentally transform their management processes – the way they plan, monitor, measure, and analyze their business performance, throughout the entire company to improve productivity, costs, and decisions. It is a step ahead of traditional Excel-based planning and budgeting and legacy enterprise performance solutions.

Circle

Circle provides hosted continuous integration for web applications. Once developers push their code to GitHub, Circle immediately begins testing it, and deploying the application to Heroku if tests are successful.

The CloudBeat 2012 Innovation Showdown is sponsored by Norwest Venture Partners.

It’s one track in a program packed full of never-before-seen customer case studies, fireside chats with top-level speakers, and focused breakout sessions.

Tickets are very limited, so make sure to grab yours today!

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

Image via Shutterstock