Mykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.

New investors include Ironport founder Scott Banister, Jeff Clarke (executive chairman of Travelport, chairman of Orbitz and board member of Red Hat) and Mike Jones (founder and CEO of Clover Capital).

Mykonos’s Web Security product uses deception to “detect, confuse, slow down and prevent attackers” in real-time in order to help companies protect their websites and Web apps from malicious hacker and proactively prevent fraud and theft.

Just recently, the company moved its headquarters to the heart of Silicon Valley – they also have offices in New York.

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Cloud emailing service provider Mailjet has raised 180,000 euros from Brussels-based eFounders, an earlier backer.

Obviously, that’s not an enormous fundraising round, but Mailjet is an interesting company solving a real problem and challenging more established, venture capital-backed rivals like SendGrid and Mailgun, so let’s take a closer look.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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Today sees the launch of the Social Business Index, a project from social business services company Dachis Group. In essence, the information service aims to provide some insights into how ‘social’ companies are, and how they stack up against similar corporations in their respective industries and their competitors, and provide some ‘social business’ benchmarks by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand.

If Klout is about trying to measure the ‘socialness’ and influence of people and rank them, Dachis Group basically wants to do the same for corporations, in real time.

The company says the Social Business Index is but a lightweight glimpse onto its big data analytics platform. Currently, Dachis Group tracks over 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies and over 100,000,000 social media accounts worldwide (plus “hundreds of millions” of other sources).

Over 300 large companies have signed on as beta participants, including giants like Samsung, Dell, Coca-Cola, Target, Levi’s and IBM.

The data used to put together the Index is made up of company, employee, partner, vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and derived from APIs and data obtained through purchases, partnerships, scraping, crowdsourcing and otherwise by its internal data team.

Says Jeffrey Dachis, founder and CEO of Dachis Group:

“Unlike the typical ‘top 100′ lists that litter software vendor and social media consultant blogs, the Social Business Index is based on deep big data analysis of a company’s engagement globally and can give insight to companies on optimizing their social spend.”

The top 5 today: Facebook, Google, News Corp, Coinstar and Wal-Mart, in that order.

The Social Business Index is free, with advanced features available to companies and registered users for a fee.

Dachis Group says it will start selling an advanced set of SaaS applications with deeper views and approaches to understanding the data with a SaaS model, as well as premium pricing schemes, before the end of this year.

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Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, is announcing a comprehensive partner program today for the companies that use its services.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.

The partner program includes a self-­‐certification suite that enables vendors to test and validate hardware and software for supportable operation within an Apache Hadoop cluster. Partners will also receive resources on technical training, marketing tools and more. And the company showcases certain on vendors across the ecosystem, so prospective companies can get insight on actual deployments.

Ed Albanese, business development chief for Cloudera, explains that that certification program is important to companies, and is similar to how Red Hat to validates the Linux operating system. With the partner program in general, he explains that Cloudera is trying to introduce a commercial link to see what’s happening in the development process and get an inside view into vendors.

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Incubated within big data company Greenplum (acquired by EMC in 2010) and following 15 months of product development, Silicon Valley-based Alpine Data Labs launches its solution for “Big Data Predictive Insight” in the United States today.

The company is also announcing that it has landed $7.5 million in Series A funding from Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia. The company is also backed by Stanford University.

The funding will be used to help Alpine Data Labs increase staff in China and the US and accelerate product development and sales.

Here’s how Alpine Data Labs CEO Anderson Wong pitches his company:

“Companies cannot wring all the possible value from their data because the potential in their data is growing faster than they can analyze it, they don’t have enough resources with analytics expertise, and the tools they’re using are too complex to get to the answers they need quickly and effectively. But Alpine Data Labs takes these walls down, making it possible to use the power of Big Data to more accurately predict the future.”

Wong co-founded the company in 2010 after serving as general manager at Greenplum, where he responsible for that company’s entry into China. He also served in a variety of management positions at IBM and Sun Microsystems.

CTO and co-founder Yi-Ling Chen has over 20 years’ experience in IT and consulting, including serving as technical director of support and service for Greenplum in China.

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Covertix, an Israeli startup that provides enterprise-grade solutions for protecting and monitoring sensitive corporate data, has raised $1 million in early-stage funding. The round was led by Kima Ventures, the investment firm founded by well-known European entrepreneurs Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel.

Covertix says the capital will be used to try and gain market share across the European market, expand sales and marketing activities and product development.

Covertix offers independent file-level surveillance and control. The company’s flagship product, SmartCipher, helps companies protect confidential and sensitive data wherever it goes – both inside and outside the organization even when used by third parties, stolen or lost.

In this day and age, an offering that should be compelling for many a company.

Covertix is backed by Kima Ventures, The Office of the Chief Scientist of Israel, Maayan Ventures and accredited angel investors.

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SAP certified partner Taulia, provider of a “Dynamic Discounting” platform for corporations using SAP, announced this morning that it raised $3.2 million in financing from new investors ncluding Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. Previous backers such as The Angels’ Forum also participated in the round.

The company says the freshly secured capital will be used to expand its sales teams in the United States and Europe.

Taulia essentially enables corporations to pay their invoices early through its SaaS Dynamic Discounting solution, which often results in cost-cutting thanks to the early payment discounts they stand to receive from their suppliers.

The company’s on-demand platform promises to let companies connect to any proprietary portal or third-party e-invoicing network, or to embed its functionality therein.

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The Planet and SoftLayer, both giants in the world of dedicated server and Web hosting services, have merged. The news of the merger, which has been subject of rumors and speculation for months now, was confirmed in a (confidential) email that was sent out by The Planet earlier this morning. In the email, the company says that the news will be made public “soon”.

But why wait for them, right?

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Today at a press event in San Francisco, Intel and a group of 70 companies announced an alliance to build a system of open standards for cloud computing. Part of the Cloud 2015 initiative, The Open Data Center Alliance makes it easier for customers to deploy cloud computing solutions, as it focuses on interoperability, flexibility and unifying industry standards. The Open Data Center Alliance will represent more than $50 billion in annual IT investment.

Intel, which powers 9 out 10 of the servers for cloud today, will be a technical advisor and non voting member in the alliance. The companies involved are cross-vertical including Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, BMW and JP Morgan Chase, joining together with Intel towards the ultimate endgoal of simplified virtual computing. While Google, Amazon Yahoo are missing from the list, Intel commented that membership is still open, “There’s a lot of people still in the pipeline. We’re adding people by the minute.”

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Connotate, which aims to help companies collect data and content from the Web and transform this unstructured data into actionable enterprise intelligence, this morning announced that it has raised $5.25 million in venture capital from .406 Ventures.

Based on technology developed at Rutgers University, Connotate provides customized real-time Web information extraction capabilities that help organizations transform data into actionable intelligence, in order to create new revenue streams, increase productivity and track Web sites with automated processes.

Connotate says its solution helps individual organizations detect changes, collect and organize data from more than 3 million Web pages per day.

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