San Jose, CA, USA. 26th September 2016: The winners of the IoT and Cloud Innovation Awards 2016 were announced at NetEvents Global Press & Analyst Summit at the Mountain Winery, Saratoga, USA. These prestigious awards celebrate the most innovative start-ups and established companies in the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud markets.
Five categories were awarded this year: Hot Start Up – IoT; Hot Start Up – Cloud; IoT Innovation Leader and Cloud Innovation Leader, plus an additional category – the Innovation Idol Award – presented for an individual who, in the judges’ opinion, had made an outstanding and inspirational contribution to the industry during the past year. All money raised by this years’ awards is being shared between three charities: STEM, UNICEF and the Prostate Project Foundation. This years’ charitable contributions brought the total raised to-date to over $115,000.
The two Leader Awards, for established companies, were judged by an independent panel of 30+ leading technology press and industry analysts representing 35+ across the globe. The winner of the IoT Innovation Leader Award – presented by Sathya Atreyam, Research Manager Worldwide Wireless Network Infrastructure, IDC – was IBM Watson IoT. The judges remarked on the company’s leading role in IoT/Analytics/Cloud convergence and the product’s operational simplicity that just gave it the edge over the other finalists: Intel, Qualcomm and Wedge Networks Inc.
The Cloud Leader Award – presented by Erin Dunne, Director of Research Services, Vertical Systems Group – went to Amazon Web Services (AWS) who, in the judges’ opinion had “turned conventional enterprise IT wisdom on its head by providing reliability and speed at the lowest possible cost” and set a defining standard for the cloud. AWS had faced strong competition from the other finalists: Google, Ixia and Salesforce.
For the two Start Up categories the finalists were short-listed by the same media judges and then required to give a short elevator-pitch in ‘Shark Tank’ style at the NetEvents Global Press & Analyst Summit gala dinner before an audience of technology leaders, press and analysts representing over 35+ countries around the world. The finalist judging panel included Silicon Valley VCs and business angels. From the three Hot Start-Up Cloud Award finalists – Menlo Security, VeloCloud and ZeroStack Inc. – Menlo Security were chosen to receive the award presented by Jim Lussier, Managing Partner, The Coast Ridge Group. Jim Lussier comments “It was a very strong field of companies for us to pick a winner from. In the end, the judges felt Menlo Security’s breakthrough “isolation platform” approach and highly effective presentation best exemplified disruptive innovation and earned them the NetEvents 2016 Innovation Award in the Hot Start-Up Cloud category.”
For the Hot Start-Up IoT Award – presented by Janice Roberts, Partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Benhamou Global Ventures – Cylance took the lead from the two other finalists: H3 Dynamics Holdings Pte Ltd and Javelin Networks. Janice Roberts commented “The “Internet of Things” is quickly extending into the fields of healthcare, transportation and mission-critical industrial applications, where reliable, preventative, cybersecurity solutions are essential. Cylance already provides a proven solution to endpoint security having rapidly acquired over 1,000 customers, while routinely preventing over 99% of threats. We believe that CylancePROTECT through combining an Artificial Intelligence, cloud-based approach, and utilizing minimal CPU resource, can offer the scale, performance and cost requirements that the industry needs to safely deploy, manage and connect millions of smart devices.”
The additional Innovation Idol Award – presented by Mark Fox, CEO of NetEvents – went to Stuart McClure, CEO/President and Founder, Cylance. In the words of Mark Fox: “Stuart McClure is a highly creative innovator – as well as author and entrepreneur – and a worthy winner of this year’s NetEvents Innovation Idol award. Stuart has set a trend that is taking the industry by storm: taking a disruptive approach to security by incorporating highly effective Artificial Intelligence and machine learning techniques into latest generation security applications. As Innovation Idol, Stuart joins an elite club of past winners that includes Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, OpenFlow inventor Martin Casado who set the industry down the SDN path and Silicon Valley legend Andy Bechtolsheim.”
The NetEvents Global press and Analyst Summit offers a stimulating and topical two-day conference program of hot debates, head-to-heads and presentations by visionaries and industry analysts. For vendors it provides an exceptional opportunity to meet these networking and communications industry gatekeepers and spend quality time together in an informal yet focused environment. For full details of the NetEvents program of events and awards visit: www.netevents.org
