Authored by Gartner analysts Donna Scott, Milind Govekar, David Williams, and Will Cappelli, "Cool Vendor in IT operations, 2008" highlights six vendors in the IT operations management area that provide innovation in areas such as advertisement-based and open-source-based management, availability and performance management, testing and real-time infrastructure.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are:

• Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before
• Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology)
• Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest of curiosity in approximately the past six months.

The report evaluated 3Tera's AppLogic Grid operating system, which enables the first true utility computing services that completely remove the cost and complexity associated with infrastructure.

"We are honoured to be highlighted in Gartner's "Cool Vendor in IT operations" report, as a company that any IT I&O executives in midsize and large enterprises, hosting provider CTO or service-line manager seeking to offer shared utility computing services to its clients should assess", stated Bert Armijo, Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Product management, 3Tera Inc. "We believe our inclusion in the report is recognition of us as a leader and innovator with our AppLogic grid operating system and further validates the importance of having a good architectural model for running and scaling Web 2.0 applications."

The AppLogic Grid operating system is the first commercial platform designed specifically to enable true utility computing. The system converts commodity servers into scalable Grids on which users can visually deploy, operate and scale transactional Web applications without any modification of code. At the heart of the system is 3Tera's disposable infrastructure technology that packages applications with the definition of the infrastructure required to run them into self-contained and portable entities, able to run on any Grid anywhere in the world. As a result, applications become completely separated from the hardware infrastructure traditionally needed to run them, allowing users to remotely manage their applications through a Web browser and provision resources as needed.