A successful venture needs three things in equal measure. Its products must address a clear market need; this should be exemplified by use cases and ideally should not require a whole lot of educating target users. A new product must be innovative in the sense it can deliver greater benefits to its target user base. And a new venture’s founders must show enterprise in that they can set up a business notwithstanding difficulties they face in raising capital, making first sales and managing new teams.
I have found quite a few young companies that have these qualities. Apppoint is one of them. 
I happened to meet up with their CTO a couple of months ago and was very interested to see an application virtualization platform they are selling. Put in simple words, application virtualization means the ability to integrate traditional client-server applications (the ones where client software sits on the desktop) and new software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (where the client software is served from a server on users’ browsers). An example would be integrating, lets say, a companies legacy desktop accounting system to an online sales management application on SalesForce.
As more and more enterprises move towards the SaaS model of software delivery, the challenge of migrating older systems and integrating them with newer SaaS delivered systems is enormous. Apppoint’s BizApp virtualization platform is meeting this very clear and existing market need. The proof is their client base which has names like Motorola, Nokia, TI and many other well known companies.
Apppoint is also high on innovation. Their product which is essentially a suite of process modeling, workflow, mapped application modules of popular systems such as Siebel, connectors, and user interface designers that enable integration with zero coding requirement and is offered as a software-as-a-service itself. Apppoint calls this ‘Integration as a Service’ model which sounded very intriguing in the beginning. The zero coding claim is made probably because Apppoint has got connectors for a lot of systems such as Rational, SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, Microsoft Office and support native connectors as well.
Coming to demonstrating enterprise, Apppoint’s founders all came out of Rational where they worked till a couple of years back, implemented the product and acquired customers without resorting to any external funding. The product is only 5 months old but already looks very mature. See their demo here. The company is already 48 people strong and is looking to expand its geographic reach and solutions portfolio.
I will cover two more companies in the same league as Apppoint over the next few days.