Last week, I profiled the companies that made 2010 a noteworthy year, but those companies weren’t alone in making headlines. Others, including the ones profiled here, also made big moves in 2010, the results of which won’t likely materialize until later this year. If it all pans out as predicted, however, the infrastructure market — from processors to servers to cloud platforms — will undergo some major transformations. Whether they’re up-and-comers such as Calxeda, tech giants such as Cisco or expanding niche-market leaders like Salesforce.com, these companies have the product lineups, vision and the technological chops to deliver innovations in 2011 that will have enduring effects.

Calxeda. All processor-savvy eyes are on Calxeda (formerly Smooth-Stone), so the company had better deliver when it announces its first ARM-powered server next year. It has raised $48 million thus far and been covered pretty much everywhere, which means its hotly anticipated offering will face heavy scrutiny from industry watchers (unlike ZT Systems, whose custom-built ARM-powered servers flew largely under the radar). But Calxeda does have one big ace up its sleeve to ensure it doesn’t disappoint — it has ARM Holdings as an investor. With a monetary stake in Calxeda’s success, it seems like a safe bet that ARM will offer some guidance as to the right specs for building servers from the ground up to support ARM processors. Energy-conscious data center operators are waiting.

Cisco. It’s not exactly an up-and-comer, but Cisco could break significant new ground in 2011. Much of this change could be in its core networking businesses. Here, Cisco will feel increased pressure to embrace features like open source and virtual switches to compete against a hungry group of smaller vendors that each have compelling arguments for why their approach is better than Cisco’s, especially for SMB customers and those operating cloud environments. Speaking of cloud computing, we should expect something big from Cisco in this area, too, especially with cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker having been on board since July and finally getting accustomed to life at Cisco. Lew’s past experiences developing Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and building Sun Microsystems’ cloud strategy demonstrates that he knows a thing or two about cloud innovation; Cisco has the mental and financial resources to help him deliver on whatever his vision for Cisco turns out to be. Then there are the rumors of a VMware and/or EMC acquisition, which although possibly fantastical, are indicative of a real need for Cisco to expand its data center and cloud business beyond servers and switches.

CouchOne. Of all the NoSQL database vendors in the market right now, CouchOne might be the most interesting because it decided, in November, to distance itself from the NoSQL label. Because of this decision, how the company, which sells a commercialized version of the CouchDB database targeted at mobile applications, performs next year could have major effects. For one, broad adoption by developers could drastically change the data experiences we have with our mobile devices because we’ll be able to access application data even without web access. But broad adoption also could make companies still pushing NoSQL start thinking about their own target use cases to drive customer traction beyond traditional Big Data environments.

Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com wasn’t much of a cloud computing company heading into November, but it closed 2010 with a bang. In consecutive days, the SaaS leader announced its surprisingly inclusive Database.com service and bought white-hot Ruby-focused PaaS startup Heroku. Throw in the VMforce offering currently in the works with partner VMware, and Salesforce.com has cloud computing bomb set to explode when everything becomes available in 2011. Heroku, of course, has been up and running for a while, and continues to garner praise. The platform is set to soar well beyond 100,000 applications early in 2011, and it will be interesting to watch how the company, now with backed by a billion-dollar parent company, expands its capabilities to address growing competition from PaaS providers like Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Engine Yard. Of course, all of Salesforce.com’s moves are part of a greater strategy to draw in developers, and many still appear skeptical about working with Salesforce.com tools.

Joyent. Joyent played a role in Dell’s big 2010 by becoming a cloud-software OEM partner for Dell’s cloud-optimized servers, but the real action for Joyent won’t likely come until next year. Aside from its deal with Dell, the company is riding the momentum of a big investment from technology partner Intel, as well as the launch of on-premise software and a PaaS offering to complement the IaaS service for which Joyent is primarily known. Thanks to its extremely talented software engineers, Joyent’s products stand out in their abilities to maximize performance and efficiency at massive scale. With its breadth of products and broad distribution channel — which might very well expand to include additional server makers — the cloud world will become reacquainted with a new Joyent in 2011.

OpenStack. Despite it not having produced any deliverables until October, the OpenStack project was the subject of much discussion and excitement during 2010. This is probably due, in equal parts, to the industry-wide desire for an open-source cloud platform and the project’s main contributors, Rackspace and NASA. In addition to its two leaders, OpenStack, which aims to develop an open-source platform for managing cloud infrastructure, has enough industry support and enough skilled developers to justify the level of confidence among supporters. Even Eucalyptus, the internal-cloud pioneer that many believe OpenStack has displaced, is getting on board. We’ll see how legit the project really is in 2011, when it releases its first two production-ready versions, first for smaller deployments, then at service provider-scale. If Rackspace is successful replacing its current IaaS platform with the OpenStack software, I have to think many other providers will give OpenStack a whirl.

Red Hat. Red Hat didn’t have a groundbreaking 2010, but it did establish itself as a potentially serious player in the enterprise cloud computing space. As its new acquisitions and business lines get better-integrated into Red Hat’s lineup, we’ll see more clearly just how big a player it will be. At the foundational level, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization started to attract quite a following, even from IBM, which is using RHEV as the foundation for its public cloud offerings. In June, Red Hat packaged a variety of its products — including RHEV, JBoss and its systems-management offerings — under the Cloud Foundations banner. This put a stamp of legitimacy on Red Hat’s previous cloud work with projects like its open source Deltacloud API. Finally, in November, Red Hat bought PaaS startup Makara, which gives Red Hat a tool with which to target enterprise users both internally and in the public cloud. During 2011, I expect to see Red Hat productize some cloud-related research projects (perhaps from the StormGrind family, or Infinispan), expand its presence across all levels of the cloud stack (perhaps by buying Eucalyptus or otherwise developing an IaaS capability), and challenge VMware and Microsoft for enterprise cloud supremacy.

Twitter. A Luddite when it comes to social media usage — I tweet only occasionally and log into Facebook about twice a month — I’m not overly concerned with how Twitter’s service evolves during 2011. I am, however, interested to see what new massive-scaling techniques it introduces to the world. It’s almost certain new releases are coming because it seems there’s an evolution in open-source releases, whereby each generation of web company releases more than the previous generation. Think about it: Google occasionally releases a cool tool, Facebook releases them fairly regularly and it appears that Twitter releases most everything it builds (e.g., FlockDB and Gizzard, to name a few). With Twitter usage always on the rise — thus the data center it announced in July — we should be in for a big year of Twitter exposing to the world how it handles huge amounts of data, complex social graphs and the challenges of managing everything in real time.

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