Containers Trailblazers 2020 – Shortlist

We have a bumper number of entries to the Tech Trailblazers Awards this year. 2020 has seen a considerable uptick since last year, an increase of over 50%, demonstrating that even more startups in the enterprise tech space are continuing to take positive steps to gain the recognition from awards in order to stand out from the crowd when it comes to seeking investment, clients, and potential acquirers.

The Containers Trailblazers is open to startups that offer innovative enterprise container solutions to companies based anywhere around the world. This category seeks to recognize the early-stage startups who are delivering next-generation application infrastructure that help containers evolve from developer laptops to full scale enterprise production success stories. The big names might be Docker and Kubernetes, but we aim to find the other hottest players in the fast-evolving container stack.

Congratulations to this year’s shortlist for the Containers category:

• Ambassador Labs – Their mission is to help organizations embrace the cloud-native culture by building infrastructure and tools that empower developers and engineering organizations to scale faster than ever. Website Twitter LinkedIn
• Droplet Computing – Droplet Computing is a unique and secure container technology that decouples applications from the operating system and enables them to run on any device, on- or offline. Website Twitter LinkedIn
• NeuVector – NeuVector offers Kubernetes security and delivers the first and only multi-vector container firewall. Website Twitter LinkedIn
• StackRox – StackRox helps enterprises secure their containers and Kubernetes environments at scale. Website Twitter LinkedIn
• Styra – Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce, and monitor policy across their cloud-native environments. Website Twitter LinkedIn

Containers Trailblazers  success – the story so far

The Containers Trailblazers is one of the newer categories of the Tech Trailblazers Awards, having been introduced in 2018. Even though there have only been two previous Awards for the category there has already been a trio of acquisitions, all of whom made the shortlist in 2019, that totaled $670 million.

Portworx, who won in 2019, was purchased by Pure Storage for $370 million in September this year. Notably the firm had been a runner-up the year before, showing that perseverance can pay off.

Two out of the three runners-up in 2019 also went on to be acquired. Aporeto was purchased for $150 million last year by Palo Alto Networks, and Kasten was also bought for $150 million, just last month by Veeam. This all goes to show how not only winners but also those recognised by our esteemed judges can catch the eye of a larger firm who then buys them up, often the startup founder’s dream exit.

Now we’re onto the second round of judging and the voting stage of the Awards. The public vote is now open, vote here now! Voting closes on Thursday 3rd December and the winners will be announced on Tuesday 8th December.

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Other shortlists

AI	Big Data	Blockchain
Cloud	Containers	Developer
Female CxO	FinTech	Firestarter
IoT	Male CxO	Mobile
Networking	Security	Storage