Casualties are beginning to pile up in the shakeout of the storage networking market. But unlike other boom-and-bust bubbles, this one will create at least one or two noteworthy companies.
The Byte and Switch Top Ten Private Companies list is a snapshot of the firms we think are best positioned to stay the course. Unfortunately, picking the survivors is increasingly coming down to one thing these days: Who has enough cash to ride out the downturn?
The latest example of a startup with strong technology and a solid management team that simply ran out of money is Acirro Inc. Others, like Sanrise Inc., have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the hope of pulling through, while some have scraped together a few pennies from asset sales, as Cereva did (see Acirro Hits Zero, Sanrise Files Chapter 11, and Cereva Sells Out to EMC).
Waiting out this brutal economy in the hope of being acquired is no fun either, particularly when the volume of M&A activity is decreasing (see M&A Slowdown Hurts Startups).
And the carnage is only just beginning. Take a look at the growing number of companies chopping headcounts in order to slow down their burn rate:
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
