Xkoto, which makes virtualization software to improve database reliability, got top honors from a panel of CIOs in the Startup City competition at the InformationWeek 500 Conference on Tuesday.

Xkoto competed with five other vendors, including suppliers of open source CRM and networking technologies, and a Web security vendor.

Judges said they were impressed by xkoto because it provided a product with a simple service, in a narrow niche, which the vendor seemed to understand very well. "I saw enterprise value for a modest investment," Alaska Airlines CIO Robert Reeder, one of the judges, said. Often, vendors try to be everything to everyone. "You have to avoid the temptation to say yes to every question from a customer," Toromont Industries CIO Mike Cuddy, another judge, said.

The xkoto technology is designed to improve database uptime while streamlining some of the massive redundancy that enterprises invest in backup servers to keep their databases available. Enterprises typically run their databases on servers with 150% capacity. Then they'll have a second server in the datacenter for passive standby, also with 150% capacity. Then, for disaster recovery, they have a third server at a remote location -- also with 150% capacity.

xkoto's Gridscale technology allows enterprises to run commercial, off-the-shelf databases on clusters of commodity systems with the same or better reliability and performance as much more expensive proprietary systems, according to the company's Web site.. Gridscale is an active-active technology, so all the servers on the grid are accessible, fully utilized and can be geographically dispersed to mitigate disasters.

Gridscale performs load balancing, and works with IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.

For more information about server virtualization, download the InformationWeek report: "The New Sprawl: Managing Virtual Server Environments."

Companies in the Startup City competition provided three-minute presentations about themselves and their technologies, followed by four minutes of questioning by the panel of three CIO judges. The judges rated the companies numerically, and then picked the highest-scoring company as the winner.

InformationWeek editor John Foley said Startup City -- which is also a column in InformationWeek magazine and a blog -- was born out of a 2007 meeting of the InformationWeek Editorial Advisory Board, when CIOs said they don't really use technology from startups, and are therefore missing out on a source of innovation. In an InformationWeek survey of CIOs and high-level IT managers, 70% said their companies use little or no technology from startups, for fear of losing out on support.

Alaska Airlines isn't afraid of startups, Reeder said. For example, self-service check-in kiosks were a product of a startup.