Venture capital money is flowing freely. Cloud infrastructure is enabling startup companies to operate on scant fixed investment. Next-generation technologies are promising to revolutionize business processes. In many ways, it is a boon time for enterprise technology.

But for finance chiefs trying to pick their way through whitepapers, conferences, product pitches, and webinars, the array of products and vendors can be dizzying. And new companies pop up continually, making it difficult to keep up with the latest and greatest.

To give CFOs a sense of the exciting tech developments going on, as well as alert them to innovative solutions, the editors of CFO decided to filter the marketing noise generated by tech firms. The goal was to produce a short list of promising companies and applications geared toward the next-generation enterprise. Since CFOs have a large hand in technology adoption, we considered solutions for finance as well as other parts of the organization.

The result is our first-ever list of 20 tech companies to watch, determined solely by the editorial team. Why did we select the companies on the following pages? We think they offer compelling products that address definable pain points in many businesses, and while many of these vendors are privately held, they look to be formidable players in their categories.

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