Cohesive FT is in InfoWord’s Top Ten
My friend Alexis Richardson is a provider of elastic to the financial world. Well, a provider of “Elastic Servers” that is, which are collections of applications packaged as virtual servers. The company he co-founded, Cohesive FT, has just appeared in InfoWorld’s top 10 tech startups for 2008. Hurrah!
The company name and corporate web pages are somewhat abstract, but it’s clear that there’s something significant going on here from the community forming around their technology platform. Users are free to assemble a collection of applications, called a stack, and publish them for others to make use of, amortizing the cost of their creation and configuration.
In a similar vein is Kimbro Staken’s company JumpBox, which packages single applications as virtual servers. They just raised another round of funding and it looks like they have revamped their website to have that popular three-things-on-the-home-page look. They are focused on solving the problem of getting users from download to running application as quickly as possible, which is a hurdle that users are putting less effort into jumping over. JumpBox gets less attention than they deserve, probably because they’re based out of Pheonix Arizona, where startups are thin on the ground.
Kimbro and I were competitors for a while, back when we were both working on native XML databases, I was working on DB XML and he was working on dbXML. Notice the subtle capitalization difference there!