I get to meet a lot of interesting companies in my capacity here at Network World, some of them newcomers, some more established. Here's a roundup of a few that are addressing common problems:
Enterproid: Founded by folks that worked in mobile security at Morgan Stanley, the company offers a BYOD solution called Divide for Android and iOS devices. With Divide, employees download an app that creates a secure work bubble on their device. When a user clicks on the app they get access to their corporate email, apps and even phone controls provisioned by IT, all of which are corralled in a secure container that IT can control. The technology, which is not hypervisor based, even runs on the Kindle Fire and meets a range of strict compliance regulations (see www.divide.com).
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Talari Networks: If you use broadband to back up your MPLS links to branch offices, or need more bandwidth to remote offices but can't justify adding another MPLS trunk, Talari's Mercury appliances will enable you to amalgamate the capacity of both MPLS and broadband trunks. In use, the boxes constantly assess the quality of MPLS and broadband connections and route packets accordingly, meaning you can actually use that broadband bandwidth that had been reserved for backup, and also benefit from the ability to immediately route around failed links (see www.talari.com).
Ipanema: A French company that is newer to the U.S. market, Ipanema, like Talari, sells appliances that can share bandwidth among different types of links, but the company's focus is on application performance and monitoring and control. You determine what traffic should be top critical (say VoIP), critical (maybe ERP) and less critical (say Facebook), and the appliances manage these app flows across the available links. The devices also generate detailed WAN governance reports, showing what applications used what capacity (see ipanematech.com).
FireMon: Humans make mistakes when it comes to complex IT security environments, meaning that devices meant to provide certain protections often do not. FireMon's tools are designed to help you more effectively manage network security gear by giving you visibility into what the tools are doing/how they are configured and how they interact with other systems in the security ecosystem. The company than layers on top of that info about threats and vulnerabilities in the organization to build a picture of risk (see www.firemon.com).
Coveo: While enterprise search has been commoditized, Coveo makes it possible to correlate information from disparate sources, everything from email and Web content to engineering, ERP and CRM records, even social media tools. The information is federated and normalized into a central index, and then you customize the way to view it. You can even add people to the equation, making it possible to home in on in-house experts on a given subject (see www.coveo.com).
Read more about anti-malware in Network World's Anti-malware section.