Is there a disconnect between technology value as judged by technologists and what the venture capital community thinks? An event in Mountain View, Calif. Tuesday night perhaps indicates that there is. Billed as the “SOA Start-Up Death Matchup,” the IDBNetwork event featured four companies, Appistry, Blue Titan Software, Ipedo and Reactivity, which each gave six-minute presentations and then were peppered with questions about their company’s SOA technology and sales approaches.While Blue Titan won over the audience, Ipedo got the nod from a panel of venture capitalists judging the presentations. Appistry, with its Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric, provides application integration, featuring fault tolerance and virtualization, on low-priced Intel-based systems.“What Appistry does is we provide our customers with an opportunity to save 50 percent to 90 percent on both the capitalization and ongoing operational cost of deploying applications – SOA applications and transactional applications. And in the end, service levels go up,” said Kevin Haar, Appistry chairman and CEO.Blue Titan’s Enterprise SOA Fabric and Network Director software expose applications as shared, network services. “Fundamentally, the purpose and the goal of our company is to help enterprises transition toward being a services-oriented enterprise,” said Blue Titan Founder, Chairman and CTO Frank Martinez.Ipedo, with its XIP product, offers enterprise information integration. A virtual database provides a declarative way of gathering data from disparate systems, said Tim Matthews, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Ipedo. “We often ask people, ‘So what’s your data integration strategy? How are you going to get data in,’ ” Matthews said. Reactivity sells hardware to process XML messages. One customer, a financial institution that was not named during the presentation, uses Web services and Reactivity appliances to transfer more than $20 billion in assets. “What we’ve enabled them to do is significantly reduce the time that it takes to deploy a new connection,” said Glenn Osaka, president and CEO of Reactivity. Deployment times have dropped from six to nine months to days or hours, Osaka said. Osaka, though, recognized the possibility that network hardware giant Cisco Systems might eventually infringe on Reactivity’s turf. However, Cisco has yet to produce a credible product to match Reactivity, according to Osaka. Following the presentation, a poll of the audience, which contained approximately 40 technology-minded persons, favored Blue Titan as the company most likely to succeeed amongst the four presenters. But Ipedo won the approval of the panel of three venture capitalists. The panel liked the company’s sales model that recognized the need for channel partners. Blue Titan, meanwhile, scored lowest with the panel. FWIW, the four vendors all face a crowded field of supposed SOA technologies, with seemingly every major vendor now pitching SOA strategies. Startups could find themselves succumbing to the temptations of being acquired by established vendors that would rather buy technology to fit a need than develop it in-house. Technology Industry