Pure Storage changed its name, but the more consequential move is underneath the sign: a flash-storage pioneer is trying to make the data layer itself searchable, governed and ready for AI.
It started as the technology arm of a regional Bell telephone company. Three decades and a private-equity buyout later, CBTS runs cloud, security, and communications for 3,000-plus businesses - and it wants to be the partner that makes its clients look good.
Kyndryl inherited the systems big companies cannot switch off. Now the IBM spin-off is trying to turn that unglamorous responsibility into a modern consulting, cloud and AI business.
Backup used to mean making a copy. Commvault is betting the harder, more valuable job is proving an entire business can come back clean - data, identities, applications and cloud infrastructure included.
The company you have probably never heard of owns the buildings your favorite apps actually live in. Here is how a REIT born from bankruptcy auctions became the landlord of the AI boom.
Arcserve has spent more than four decades preparing for the day a company cannot open its own files. Its latest bet is that lean IT teams want one recovery system - with immutable storage, broader virtualization support and a little AI - more than another sprawling security console.
A10 Networks built a durable business in the least glamorous place on the internet: the traffic choke point. Now the same machinery that kept telecom networks moving is being recast for APIs, AI models and agentic software.
The unglamorous software that keeps 300,000 networks from falling over - and the Austin company that learned to rebuild trust after the most talked-about hack of the decade.
The 25-year-old telecom spinoff that answers the phones for most of the Fortune 100 is betting its second act on hybrid AI-powered customer experience - without asking anyone to rip out what already works.
Oasis Security is a New York and Tel Aviv based cybersecurity company that built the first enterprise platform purpose-built to discover, secure, and govern non-human identities (NHIs) - the service accounts, API keys, tokens, workloads, and increasingly the AI agents that now vastly outnumber human users in modern cloud environments. Founded in 2022 by former Israeli intelligence engineers Danny Brickman and Amit Zimmerman, Oasis gives security teams a single source of truth for machine identities, automating inventory, posture management, threat detection, remediation, and full lifecycle governance. As enterprises race to deploy AI agents that can act autonomously with real credentials, Oasis positions its Agentic Access Management platform as the control layer that lets companies scale AI without losing control of who - and what - has access.
StorONE is a New York-based enterprise storage software company founded in 2011 by Gal Naor and Raz Gordon. Its ONE Storage Platform separates storage services from hardware, delivering block, file and object storage from a single, hardware-agnostic engine. By rewriting the storage stack from scratch, StorONE combines high performance, real-time auto-tiering across flash and HDD, immutable-snapshot ransomware recovery and per-drive licensing to help enterprises cut storage costs while running on commodity servers.
IBM (International Business Machines) is a 114-year-old American technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, that helps large enterprises and governments run and modernize their most demanding operations. Today its business centers on three pillars - hybrid cloud through Red Hat, enterprise AI through the watsonx platform and open Granite models, and consulting - while it continues to build the underlying hardware, from z-series mainframes to research-grade quantum computers. IBM reported $67.5 billion in 2025 revenue and remains one of the largest patent holders and research organizations in the world.
Equinix is a global digital infrastructure company that designs, builds and operates carrier-neutral colocation data centers - its International Business Exchange (IBX) centers - where enterprises, cloud providers, networks and financial institutions place equipment and interconnect directly with one another. Founded in 1998 on the principle of neutrality, Equinix has grown into the world's largest data center and interconnection platform, operating a programmable network of more than 270 data centers across roughly 75+ markets in 30+ countries. Structured as a real estate investment trust (REIT) since 2015, the company pairs physical colocation with software-defined services such as Equinix Fabric, Metal and Network Edge, positioning itself as the meeting place for hybrid multicloud and, increasingly, distributed AI workloads.
Evocative is a Los Angeles-based digital infrastructure provider that delivers enterprise-grade colocation, bare metal servers, carrier-neutral network, and managed services. Built largely through acquisition, its footprint spans roughly 20 data centers and dozens of Points of Presence across strategically located North American, European, and Asian metros. Evocative positions itself as a carrier-neutral, edge-ready alternative to the largest colocation operators, giving enterprises and service providers full control over performance, connectivity, and scaling for workloads that increasingly include AI.
Megaport is an Australian network-as-a-service company that lets enterprises spin up private, high-speed connections between data centers and the major public clouds in minutes rather than months. Through a software-defined network spanning more than 1,100 enabled data centers across some 30 countries, Megaport replaces the fixed contracts and manual provisioning of traditional telecom with on-demand, elastic bandwidth billed by the hour. Its platform - centered on Virtual Cross Connects, the Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge - connects over 4,000 customers to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hundreds of other providers. Listed on the ASX as MP1, the company is now extending from connectivity into compute as it builds toward a globally distributed AI inference cloud.
Simr, formerly UberCloud, is a Los Altos, California company that automates engineering simulation in the cloud. Its SimOps (Simulation Operations Automation) platform lets design engineers run compute-heavy simulations - CFD, FEA and multi-physics workloads - on any cloud or on-premise hardware with leading tools like Ansys, Siemens and Dassault, without wrestling with the underlying HPC infrastructure. Founded in 2014 by Burak Yenier and Wolfgang Gentzsch, the company raised a $20M Series A in 2024 and counts major manufacturers and tech giants among its users.
NetApp is a San Jose-based data infrastructure company that helps enterprises store, manage, protect and move their data across on-premises systems and every major public cloud. Founded in 1992 as Network Appliance, it built its business on the ONTAP data management operating system and today sells all-flash storage arrays, cloud storage services and software that increasingly targets AI and machine-learning workloads. A Fortune 500 company trading on the Nasdaq as NTAP, it reported record fiscal-2026 revenue of roughly $6.93 billion.
Expanso is a Seattle-based distributed data processing company built on its open-source Bacalhau project. Instead of shipping raw data to a central cloud, Expanso runs lightweight agents that filter, transform, and govern data at its source - across edge devices, on-prem systems, and multiple clouds. The 'Compute Over Data' approach cuts egress and storage costs, keeps sensitive data in place for compliance, and speeds up pipelines feeding analytics and AI. Founded in 2022 by former Google, AWS, and Microsoft engineers, it raised a $7.5M seed round in 2023.
Parallel Works is a Chicago-based software company, spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015, that builds ACTIVATE - a hybrid multi-cloud control plane for high-performance computing and AI. The platform gives researchers, engineers and defense teams a single interface to provision, orchestrate and share compute across on-premises clusters and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle), with built-in cost governance, role-based access and security controls. In 2025 ACTIVATE's High Security Platform became the first hybrid multi-cloud solution to earn a U.S. Department of Defense IL5 Authority to Operate.
Salt AI is a Los Angeles contextual-AI company building a visual platform that lets regulated enterprises - especially life sciences and healthcare teams - orchestrate many AI models into governed, auditable workflows that run inside their own infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by former Myspace CTO Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto, Salt lets biochemists and clinicians drag, drop, and chain models like AlphaFold2 (which Salt runs 22x faster), ProteinMPNN, and Chroma without writing code, turning months of pipeline engineering into weeks while keeping every prompt, weight, and response logged for compliance.
OnStak is a Milpitas, California enterprise AI consulting and hybrid-cloud services firm that helps large organizations move from AI experimentation to AI in production. With a delivery team that is roughly three-quarters AI architects and engineers, OnStak modernizes data platforms, applications and infrastructure across Cisco, NVIDIA, AWS, Oracle and on-premises environments, and ships AI products like AI Correlation Fabric, AI Assurance and AI Video Analytics. Its pitch is plain: 'Fluent in strategy, native in engineering' - straight talk about what is broken and what to fix first.
Panzura is an enterprise hybrid cloud data management company whose flagship CloudFS turns object storage into a single, global file system - letting distributed teams edit the same files across continents as if they were sitting in the same office. Paired with its Symphony data services platform and the newer Nexus AI connector, Panzura consolidates sprawling unstructured data, defends it against ransomware with immutable storage, and is now positioning that data to feed enterprise AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot.
RackWare builds enterprise-grade software that moves and protects workloads across any cloud, virtual, or physical environment. Its flagship RackWare Management Module (RMM) automates migration, disaster recovery, and backup so organizations can shift to the cloud, recover from outages, and avoid vendor lock-in - all from one policy-driven, agentless platform. Founded in 2009 and based in San Jose, California, RackWare has migrated over a million workloads and protects hundreds of thousands more for customers ranging from Fortune 50 enterprises to SMBs across 60+ countries.
Riverbed Technology is a San Francisco-based IT software company that helps large enterprises see, optimize, and troubleshoot the digital experiences their people and customers depend on. Originally famous for the SteelHead WAN-optimization appliance, Riverbed has reinvented itself around AI-powered unified observability - stitching together network, application, and end-user telemetry, then layering predictive, generative, and agentic AI on top to spot problems and increasingly fix them automatically. Founded in 2002, taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2015 and again by Vector Capital in 2023, it serves thousands of global organizations across finance, government, healthcare, retail, and beyond.
SORINT.lab is a multinational, vendor-neutral 'Next Generation System Integrator' founded in Bergamo, Italy in 1985. With roughly 1,500 engineers across 17 offices in Europe, the USA and Africa, it helps over 100 large organizations run and modernize their IT through DevOps, CI/CD, cloud adoption, application modernization, next-generation IT operations and site reliability engineering. The company is a notable open-source contributor (Agola, Stolon, Ercole, Sircles) and runs on a flat, holacracy-style 'Sircles' organizational model.
Trianz is a Silicon Valley digital-transformation firm that has reinvented itself from a traditional IT consultancy into an IP-led, 'Transformation Services as Software' company. Founded in 2001 by former special-forces officer Sri Manchala, it builds hyper-automated platforms - Concierto for multi-cloud migration and operations, Extrica for turning data into AI, and Pulse for the digital workplace - to accelerate transformations for Fortune 1000 and emerging enterprises across data, analytics, cloud, and security.
Leostream Corporation is a Boston-based software company that builds a vendor-neutral connection broker and remote desktop access platform. Its software maps end users to the right computing resource - a desktop, workstation, or GPU instance - whether that resource lives in a data center, on a physical machine, or across AWS, Azure, and OpenStack clouds. Founded in 2002 and led since 2016 by CEO Karen Gondoly, Leostream serves financial services, government and defense, media and entertainment, and oil and gas customers who need secure, single-pane management of hybrid work environments. Its platform won an Engineering Emmy in 2022.
Cohesity is a Santa Clara-based data security and management company that helps enterprises back up, protect, secure, and recover their data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. Founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, it built a hyperscale platform to consolidate fragmented secondary data, and after merging with Veritas' enterprise data protection business in December 2024 it became the world's largest data protection software provider, serving roughly 13,000 organizations including most of the Fortune 500.
Nutanix is a San Jose-based enterprise cloud software company that pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), collapsing servers, storage, virtualization and networking into a single software layer that runs the same way in a private data center, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Its platform lets IT teams run virtual machines, containers, databases and AI workloads across clouds without the operational sprawl of traditional three-tier architecture. Now a public company (NASDAQ: NTNX) with more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue and roughly 7,000+ employees, Nutanix competes head-on with VMware as enterprises rethink their virtualization stack.
Acceldata is an enterprise data observability and agentic data management company that helps large organizations monitor, govern, and optimize the pipelines, warehouses, and lakes powering modern analytics and AI. Founded in 2018 by former Hortonworks engineers, it now serves customers like Oracle, Verisk, PhonePe, and Dun & Bradstreet, and recently launched an Autonomous Data & AI Platform built around its xLake Model Context Protocol for agentic workloads.