IT startups: Just days left to enter green 'Trailblazer' awards
Young IT companies with technology that can enable a better-connected and more sustainable future have a chance to shine on the global stage through a new awards program for “Tech Trailblazers.”
Green IT startups have until 11:59 PT on Wednesday, Sept. 12, to enter the inaugural Tech Trailblazers Awards. In addition to a monetary prize, the winning company in each category will also receive coaching, mentoring and development support from venture capitalists, financial experts and CTOs in their technology area.
“Startups are key to innovation in sustainable or green IT,” said Stephen O’Donnell, a consultant, advisor and author at the IT site The Hot Aisle. “Energy and resource efficiencies are found in power management, cooling and software-defined networking, commonly known as SDN. These are just three of the areas where we are expecting to see strong green IT trailblazers contenders.”
The former head of operations for BT Global, O’Donnell is a member of the judging panel for the Tech Trailblazers Awards. Other judges on the panel include Joe Baguley, chief cloud technologist for VMware; Frank J. Bernhard, strategy and operations director for Deloitte Consulting; Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix; and Harkeeret Singh, global head of energy and sustainable IT at Thomson Reuters.
The first-ever awards will recognize private-sector companies less than five years old that are trailblazers in several categories: big data, cloud, emerging markets, mobile technology, networking, security, storage, sustainable IT and virtualization.
The Tech Trailblazers Awards prize fund — totaling around $1 million — is supported by sponsors and industry partners that include the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Amoo Venture Capital Advisory, the Cloud Security Alliance, Computing, ExecEvent, Launchpad Europe, Lissted, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Mynewsdesk, Prezi, RealWire, StartTau, Startup America, TiE Silicon Valley, and Wazoku.
