Here come the 2008 Cool Vendors. CiRBA, ExaGrid and ManageIQ each announced its designation as a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner. Gartner says its annual listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

Normally, the analyst firm names more than 120 "Cool Vendors" annually, through an extended series of special reports released during the first half of the year.

ManageIQ, an emerging leader in the management and automation of virtualized computing environments, is one of four companies highlighted in the “Cool Vendors in Server Virtualization Management, 2008” report by Gartner analysts Cameron Haight, Ronni J. Colville, and Milind Govekar. ManageIQ’s solutions, EVM Insight and EVM Control, provide essential insight, control, and automation for virtual environments.

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence software, was also named in the “Cool Vendors in Server Virtualization Management, 2008” report. CiRBA’s software enables organizations to optimally transform data centers toward more virtualized infrastructure, and then powers the ongoing management of these more dynamic environments.

ExaGrid Systems, Inc., a leader in cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with byte-level data de-duplication, was named to the list in the “Cool Vendors in Data Protection, 2008” report by Gartner analysts Dave Russell and John P. Morency.

ExaGrid noted that this year’s “Cool Vendors in Data Protection” report points to a focus on new and less expensive disk-based backup options that make the use of disk for faster backup and recovery a more viable option than traditional backup-to-tape methods. The report also notes that Gartner has seen a significant uptake in the adoption of disk-based recovery solutions in 2007 and early 2008.

So far this year, a third report rounds out the 2008 series, "Cool Vendors in Consumer Goods, 2008".

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