Open-source Cleversafe earns a WSJ Technology Innovation Award
The Wall Street Journal has announced its 2008 Technology Innovation Awards. Among the heavyweights on the list - Salesforce, Applied Materials, GlaxoSmithKline, etc. - is open-source storage vendor, Cleversafe, a company that I've long followed and admired.
It's great to see Cleversafe getting its due credit, especially from a list of judges that includes the CTO of Agilent, EVP of Software at SAP, and more distinguished names.
Here's what caught the judges' eyes:
[Cleversafe's] Dispersed Storage software breaks files up into slices and then sends the slices over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a network. By themselves, the slices are unreadable to hackers or anyone else not authorized to read them, but the original file can be easily reassembled, even if not all the slices are available due to equipment failure or natural disaster. The software also promises to be less expensive than traditional storage methods, which rely on creating full, multiple copies to protect against loss.
Jane Royston, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and an Innovation Awards judge, says the software "could be an important part of Internet data storage systems."
What a great testament to Cleversafe's continued progress and product excellence.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
