Austin-based Phurnace Software and Hyper9 were both named as “cool companies” by Gartner Group in the IT Operations and Virtualization market. Each year Gartner Group names several companies in their research areas as “cool” and making great progress in their space. According to the Gartner report:

The growth of virtualization and the emergence of Web 2.0 and cloud-computing architectures are resulting in repercussions across a range of virtualization technologies and management tools, but several vendors are applying new techniques to managing the changing IT infrastructure landscape.

Phurnace has a reprint of the report accessible through their website. Hyper9 announced the general availability of their flagship product last week. We will be on the lookout for Austin companies in their other research areas that have also been recognized this year.