xkoto, the database virtualization company, today announced it was named the winner of InformationWeek’s Startup City competition following a six-company shootout at the prestigious InformationWeek 500 conference. xkoto President and Chief Executive Officer David Patrick received the honor after presenting the company and its flagship product, GRIDSCALE, to a panel of CIO judges.

In a story published by InformationWeek, the panel of judges said they selected xkoto and GRIDSCALE because the product delivers a simple service for a specific market segment, with one judge stating, “I saw enterprise value for a modest investment.” The judges also praised xkoto for staying focused, enabling it to understand its market very well.

xkoto was named a finalist in the competition after more than 1,000 InformationWeek readers cast their votes among 50 startups chosen by InformationWeek. The six finalists were judged by the CIO panel on their business model, product and feasibility.

“Winning this competition is a great boost for xkoto and delivers a clear message that the benefits delivered by GRIDSCALE meet a great need in corporate America,” said Patrick. “The CIO judges, who are in the IT trenches every day, grasped our value proposition around database availability, scalability and flexibility, as well as our company focus on solving a discrete set of IT challenges.”

In addition to xkoto, other Startup City finalists were Vyatta, FireScope, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and Mi5 Networks.

GRIDSCALE database virtualization software manages multiple, identical databases to run on a cluster of systems with the same or better reliability and performance than more expensive, proprietary systems. Because GRIDSCALE is an active-active solution, all the servers in the cluster are accessible, fully utilized, and can be dispersed geographically to mitigate disaster scenarios. Applications get consistent data reliably and quickly, and by sharing the load across multiple servers, the loss of any one server does not have an impact on availability. In addition, systems continue to run to their full capability even when individual servers are taken offline for maintenance.