There are few clearer bellwethers as to the imminent direction of technology
than where venture capitalists put their money. They're about making money,
so they look for industry patterns they think will lead to sure bets. And that
means they invest where the tech industry has begun to coalesce its thinking,
not on exotic new science fiction. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, VCs
have invested a
total of US$57 billion in startups -- mostly tech ones -- in 2005, 2006,
and 2007.

InfoWorld also tracks tech startups but through a different lens. Our concern
isn't about a financial investment but about real technology innovation -- what
will drive technology forward in ways that could revolutionize some aspect of
business IT? That's why for the third year, we have selected the hottest technology
startups, with the emphasis on "technology." What did we seek? At
least one of three qualities: truly new technologies, innovative approaches
within existing technology areas, and technologies applied in new ways to solve
different problems.

Here are our winners for 2008, in alphabetical order.

_______________

Hot Tech Startup: Aerohive Networks

Founded: 2006

Tech breakthrough: A centrally managed wireless network built around
a controllerless architecture that can scale to thousands of access points.

Business problem addressed: As wireless networking becomes more central
to the enterprise, wireless LANs need to become much faster, more scalable,
and more resilient at a reasonable price point. By incorporating authentication,
access control, and other functions into the access point, Aerohive promises
greater flexibility and lower deployment costs than controller-based wireless
LAN solutions.

What the technology does: There's long been a gap between so-called
fat and thin access points in the world of wireless LANs. The earliest wireless
LANs, in which fat (aka intelligent) access points handled every facet of communication
between the client and the network, were quickly supplanted by a different configuration
-- thinner (aka dumb) access points managed by a centralized controller. That's
the architecture in general use today, and most IT staffers would assume that
it's a given. Vendors have beefed up the intelligence of access points over
the years, enabling them to carry out an increasingly sophisticated range of
marching orders -- but those marching orders continue to come from a wireless
LAN controller. Enter Aerohive, which has developed a hybrid architecture that
features intelligent, linked access points without the use of an expensive controller.
Even without that hardware, Aerohive offers centralized management, and the
company says its Cooperative Control Wireless LAN Architecture can scale to
thousands of access points. Furthermore, the decentralized architecture reduces
the number of failure points. Aerohive access points are more expensive than

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