What that means is that companies providing cloud computing and cloud services can tap into the experiences of all their customers to give everyone a sense of what’s going on. Nand Mulchandani, co-founder and CEO of SaaS startup ScaleXtreme calls it “the wisdom of the crowd.” Ideally, for example, his server-management service should be able to realize I’m running my servers at far too low a utilization rate compared with other customers, and it should be able tell me the ideal size instance to run and the most-effective software stack for fixing my problem.

As of Thursday, ScaleXtreme does just that. The company announced its first suite of analytics functions for configuration management, patch management, capacity and utilization, and monitoring. The analytics functions are fairly elementary off the bat, Mulchandani said — what side effects has the latest Windows patch created, what are the best software stacks, do customers running Amazon Spot Instances save more than those using Reserved Instances, etc. – but they’ll get more advanced and more predictive in time.

That’s when things get really interesting and become the Holy Grail of crowdsourced analytics. Mulchandani thinks it will be about a year before ScaleXtreme is predicting problems, but it’s coming. “If machine A fails … the first question after you cleaned up the mess is ‘Wow, what other system of mine are going to fail?’,” he explained. If it puts the right models in place to identify failure patterns across its customer base, ScaleXtreme should be able to give users that level of foresight.

Among its peers, however, ScaleXtreme isn’t necessarily unique in its thinking. Cloudability, which monitors users’ spending across their various cloud services, has told me it’s also working on incorporating big data techniques into its service. The idea there is that the company could tell users how their cloud spending and choice of services compare with those of other similarly situated users. Another startup, Newvem, uses crowdsourced insights to recommend better choice for Amazon Web Services customers.

Nodeable (see disclosure), which launched last year as a Twitter-like app for letting administrators keep track of their systems, is undergoing a significant shift into a real-time analytics engine. It’s relying on Hadoop and Storm, a real-time processing front end, to analyze and alert customers to system events as they’re happening, perhaps even before.

There’s a saying in analytics that more data trumps better algorithms, and this definitely seems to be one of those cases. A single organization can only collect and analyze its own data, but that’s just a drop in the bucket of all the data generated by everyone trying to do the same thing. Especially with a new model such as cloud computing, there could be a real value in learning from what your peers are doing.

Disclosure: Nodeable is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user HuHu.

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Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

1. AppFog 

AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.

2. Bromium

Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems.

3. Cloudability

Cloudability provides a simple service with a lot of value: it monitors customers’ spending on cloud computing resources. It might uncover something as commonplace as cloud-server sprawl because so many employees are spinning up instances, or it might find something nefarious such as hackers using a company’s instances serve boatloads of network traffic. As use of cloud services proliferates, companies will need an easy tool to help them keep track of what they’re spending and where.

4. CloudSigma 

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service space is a tough racket to enter because it means competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, but CloudSigma has a plan. The company is all about giving customers high performance and lots of control. CloudSigma sits in the impressive SuperNAP data center and offers 10 GbE interconnects as well as solid-state drives, and developers can buy and manage resources with the granular control normally found in co-location.

Kaggle, a crowdsourcing platform for solving big data challenges, is about the hottest thing going in big data right now. The idea behind the service is simple: although not everyone has data scientists in-house, there are plenty of them floating around the world perfectly happy to put their skills to work on a problem for cash prizes and a little bit of credit. It takes a lot of computing power to host hundreds of teams on any given competition, as well as the data sets, which is why Kaggle utilizes Amazon Web Services the cloud. It used to use AWS, but has since switched to Microsoft Windows Azure.

Nebula isn’t the only company pushing a commercial version of the open-source OpenStack cloud computing software — it isn’t even the only one founded by a former NASA employee — but it does have a unique approach and an impeccable pedigree. Nebula ties OpenStack to an optimized hardware platform designed to make building public clouds a plug-and-play experience. Among its founders are former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and investors include Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram.

7. Parse

Parse is trying to become a PaaS specialist for mobile apps, a laudable ambition given how many people now rely on their mobile devices just about everything. It will be difficult to distinguish itself from competitors such as Stackmob, as well as from web-app PaaS offerings such as Heroku and AppFog, but Parse seems to have the right ideas in mind. It has a backend focused on the needs of mobile apps, and a frontend designed for mobile developers that might not have extensive programming chops.

8. ScaleXtreme

What ScaleXtreme lacks in sexiness it makes up for in functionality. Everyone needs server-management software, but not everyone needs the big, expensive software offered from traditional software vendors, or even wants to manage software at all. ScaleXtreme gives users a cloud-based service to manage both physical and cloud-based servers, and, it says, has also garnered a lot of interest from cloud providers thinking it might be a good value-added service to their users who want more control.

9. SolidFire

SolidFire wants nothing less than to revolutionize cloud computing by making it palatable to large enterprises wanting to run mission-critical applications. The company targets cloud providers with SSD-based storage systems that make it possible to store virtual machine images in the cloud and still deliver high performance. Cloud providers utilizing SolidFire gear could find themselves hosting far more relational databases and other applications that presently remain in house.

10. Zillabyte

Zillabyte, still operating in private beta mode, wants to provide users with both data sets and the algorithms needed to process them. Data sets aren’t uncommon on the web, but they usually don’t come with algorithms and a processing backend. The service will initially focus on web data and text-based algorithms, but there’s plenty of room for growth into new types of data and algorithms as the service matures. Zillabyte was co-founded by two former Google software engineers and a former Intel engineer.

Image courtesy of Flickr user JamesWoolley5.

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Among the most exciting features of the early-access version, says ScaleXtreme Founder and CEO Nand Mulchandani, is the ability to perform the same operation across multiple machines in different clouds at the same time. Traditionally, said Mulchandani, administrators use shell scripts that require them to log in to each server individually. But with ScaleXtreme, administrators can select a script from their library and check the machines they want it to run on, regardless of whether those servers are located on premise or in one of many clouds that ScaleXtreme supports.

Mulchandani said potential users have also been very excited about ScaleXtreme’s version of an app store, which will let administrators upload their custom scripts to share with the community. The pricing and some other details are still being worked out, but he thinks it “will have a huge amount of utility” for administrators who have less experience managing cloud-based servers or moving from Windows to Linux.

Perhaps the best news for ScaleXtreme’s prospects, though, is the interest it has received from cloud computing providers and virtualization vendors that want to include the service as a feature for their customers. Mulchandani said he expects to close a couple of OEM deals within the next few months, which would put ScaleXtreme in front of partners’ customers as well as those users that ScaleXtreme attracts directly.

The company also won the Infrastructure category at last month’s Under the Radar conference, which highlights startups across the cloud computing ecosystem. We’ll highlight a number of cloud startups during the LaunchPad portion of our Structure 2011 conference, too. And although ScaleXtreme isn’t among them, there is no shortage of innovation.

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The Salesforce.com comparison is particularly apt. Just like Marc Benioff cut his teeth at Oracle before deciding there was a better way to do CRM software, ScaleXtreme’s founders have plenty of background in systems management from which they drew their notions that it could be done better. Mulchandani has been CEO of OpenDNS, as well as a senior director of product management at VMware, and CTO and Co-founder Balaji Srinivasa was the principal product architect at data center automation pioneer BladeLogic, which BMC bought for $800 million in 2008. Prior to that, Srinivasa held roles at CA and Unisys, among other leading technology companies. Another comparison might be to cloud-based application-performance-management startup New Relic, whose founder and CEO, Lew Cirne, also founded Wily, which is now among CA’s flagship APM applications as the result of a $375 million acquisition in 2006.

ScaleXtreme is following in the footsteps of its cloud-based, or SaaS, forefathers, too, by focusing on simplicity of use over broad capabilities. Mulchandani explained that although ScaleXtreme is “probably not going to provide every feature that Opsware (now part of HP) and BladeLogic (now part of BMC) are going to provide,” it will make simple tasks very simple. As time goes on, he added, the company plans to add more advanced and complex features, but that those will have to come organically.

The product, which Mulchandani expects will be available for early access in March and generally available about a month later, lets users manage and automate the inner workings of any servers under their control — on-premise or cloud-based, physical or virtual. It will cost between $150 and $200 a month year per server, as opposed to approximately 10 times that much for traditional systems management products. Not only are relatively low costs pretty much a prerequisite to cloud-based software products, but, as Mulchandani pointed out, paying a $1,500 a month license fee for a cloud server that costs nine cents an hour doesn’t make too much sense.

Another area where ScaleXtreme is trying to distinguish itself from traditional products is via the social nature of its product. In this case, however, social doesn’t necessarily mean likes and networking, but, rather, things that matter to systems administrators. According to Mulchandani, old-school systems management products lock in processes to that specific product and that specific system, making it essentially impossible to share them among the greater IT community. With ScaleXtreme, on the other hand, users can share links to their processes, scripts and other content, or even sell them via an app store that will be part of the GA version.

Accel Partners already has recognized ScaleXtreme’s promise to the tune of $2.42.5 million. And, in fact, that funding has allowed ScaleXtreme to follow in the footsteps of SaaS providers like Salesforce.com and New Relic in one other critical area — operating its own infrastructure. Mulchandani has done the math and concluded that his company can buy and scale with quad-core Supermicro boxes, for example, for less money than hosting its infrastructure with a cloud provider. Although, he noted, it might burst to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace if computing demand skyrockets for some reason, but that isn’t a likely concern in SaaS. Even Salesforce.com only operates about 3,000 total servers for its primary and disaster-recovery infrastructures. Mulchandani certainly isn’t bashing cloud providers, however; he added that if ScaleXtreme hadn’t already secured funding, it certainly would be using the public cloud to host its operations.

Obviously, growing to be as successful as Salesforce.com won’t be easy, but it’s definitely achievable. What makes all leading cloud services great is taking a big, but overly complex, traditional process, paring it to its core (initially), and making it both inexpensive and easy to buy, so that, in the case of ScaleXtreme, enough individual administrators can use it autonomously until it ultimately becomes a critical part of the IT environment. Systems management is very big market, and ScaleXtreme appears to have done its part. Is mass uptake next?

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