IT Awards: Startup of the Year

Apptio, Bellevue
Employees in Washington: 120

Apptios mission is practically biblical, as in, Physician, heal thyself. While IT systems help the rest of the company control costs and performance, few tools let IT departments analyze their own operations. Apptios cloud-based services track all information technology costs to aid chief information officers in maximizing return on investment.

Advances like virtual servers and grid storage make knowing the true costs of delivering services difficult. Apptios Technology Business Management solutions provide those answers and model alternatives, so customers can spend more effectively, as when Cisco Systems discovered underutilized resources that helped cut storage expenses by 25 percent.

After only three years, Apptio has generated tens of millions of dollars in sales and counts several Fortune 1000 companies among its more than 60 customers, including Facebook, Bank of America, Boeing and JPMorgan Chase. Its bookings have grown 300 percent over the past year and the company boasts more than $57 billion of IT spending under management.

[Second Place]
Symform, Seattle
Employees in WA: 21

This online storage company is based on a simple but powerful idea: Give them your cheap, unused local storage and get valuable, secure, cloud-based disaster-recovery backup in return. Instead of a centralized data center, Symform uses the internet to store clients data across the computers its own clients provide. Behind Symforms firewall, data are broken down into fragments, encrypted using military-grade encryption and dispersed randomly to other servers or drives on the network. The result is a backup system of astonishing reliability.