How it got its start: CEO Renat Khasanshyn previously headed Altoros Systems, a distributed product life-cycle management company that ran data integration projects for customers that needed to meld databases and applications but couldn't pay the steep price of tools offered from vendors such as IBM and Informatica. Altoros mostly hand coded each project, which was time consuming and vulnerable to errors, Khasanshyn says. He set out to create an open source data-integration tool that put the kibosh on manual coding. The company earned its name when Khasanshyn had about 20 friends vote on a list of about five short names, each starting with the letter "A."

Management: Besides heading Altoros, Khasanshyn, who emigrated to the United States from Russia in 2001, previously had been vice president of engineering at PriMed, a discount insurance company in Tampa, Fla.

Funding: US$500,000 from Altoros, Khasanshyn and co-founder Andrei Yurkevich.

Who uses the product: More than 400 users, including Allianz, Alcatel-Lucent, Amgen, Autodesk, Credit Suisse, University of Massachusetts and WellCare.

Interesting fact: Like Khasanshyn, other company founders and senior managers are Russian.

Attune Systems

Founded: December 2003

Headquarters: Santa Clara

What it offers: The Maestro File Manager family of appliances, which virtualize file-level storage, particularly for unstructured data housed in files created by Microsoft products. The appliances discover the files and handle non-disruptive data migration, server retirement, data consolidation, tiering and global namespace across Windows file servers and network-attached storage.

Why we like it: These appliances eliminate the hours IT managers can spend working out how to locate and archive critical files, plus it helps identify file owners, among other nifty management features. "Basically, it virtualizes the file server to the user," said Zak Khalil, MIS manager at Lessard Group, an architecture firm in Vienna, Va., in our original profile. "It runs with any existing storage. . . . It's very easy to implement, and it works."

Since our profile in August, the company has been beefing up in all directions. It added a lower-cost member to its Maestro File Manager family. It has added new capabilities, such as a text-based interface, policy-based backup and forensic file search. Plus, it landed another enterprise customer, Nvidia.

How it got its start: Attune was founded in response to the explosive growth of unstructured file data and the need to manage such data better. The founders choose its name because they wanted to convey a sense of control and alignment among unstructured data and storage resources.

Management: CEO Alan Kessler held the same position at Intransa and previously was COO at Palm.

Funding: About $US40 million from Alloy Ventures, GF Private Equity Group, Quicksilver Ventures, Rock Creek Capital, RWI Ventures, Shea Ventures and Shoreline Venture Management.

Who uses the product: Bluesocket, Central Florida YMCA, Granite Telecommunications, Insulet, Interwoven, Lessard Group, Nvidia, OceanAir, Temple Independent School District and others.

Interesting fact: In February, Attune scored a coup by hiring Thomas Wong as vice president of engineering. ThiNeoPath Networks' co-founder has held jobs at Sun and Wang Laboratories, has 29 patents (granted and pending), plus has authored an ECMA International standard on recordable CD file systems.