IP phone company ShoreTel has today announced that it is beefing up its offerings by acquiring unified communications company M5 Networks in a deal that is valued up to $146 million in cash and stock.

ShoreTel’s motivation for snatching up M5 was an effort to be able to offer its customers a choice of either on-premise or hosted solutions, enabling the company to reach a larger and growing market of users looking to deploy unified communications solutions. Gartner predicts that the “Voice as a Service” market is expected to show a 36 percent compounded annual growth rate in North America before 2015 — to $2.2 billion.

ShoreTel acquired enterprise mobility leader Agito Networks in October 2010 to extend the unified communications technology to mobile devices, enabling them to solve the bring-your-own-device problems that are changing the enterprise market.

M5 Networks, too, has made a couple of acquisitions lately, including Callfinity last year and Geckotech the year prior. The cloud communications company, which was founded in 2000, provides phone systems, applications, and cloud communications for businesses, and claims to be one of the country’s largest specialized VoIP providers.

Under the terms of the deal, M5 shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock, for a total of about $146.3 million in “initial consideration based on ShoreTel’s average stock price over the prior 30 days of trading.” Furthermore, M5 shareholders could receive additional consideration of up to $13.7, according to the company’s statement.

ShoreTel announced its Q2 earnings today, with revenue coming in at $58.0 million, up 8 percent sequentially from the first quarter of fiscal 2012 and up 22 percent from the second quarter of fiscal year 2011. Despite GAAP net loss for the quarter being $2.5 million, or $0.05 per share, ShoreTel had some highlights over the last six months, forging a distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in October, an expanded distribution agreement with Windstream, a North American communications service provider, along with expanding its relationship with Hewlett Packard, which will become a reseller of ShoreTel’s “Mobility solution.”

According to the statement, following the close of the acquisition, M5 will be operated as a ShoreTel business unit, which will be led by M5 CEO Dan Hoffman, while engineering teams will remain separate.

For more, see ShorTel’s announcement of the acquisition here and the announcement of its Q2 earnings here.

Check out our prior coverage of M5 Networks here.

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Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

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Data storage solutions provider Nexenta this morning announced that it has secured $21 million in Series C funding in a round led by new investor Menlo Ventures and joined by Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

Nexenta claims its open source storage software solutions help enterprises avoid vendor lock-in and enjoy unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

Nexenta has operations around the world in the United States (Mountain View, California), Russia, and India. Its customers include the U.S. Army and Korea Telecom.

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Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners. Existing investor Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8 million.

With more than 3.8 million subscribers, Symplified offers a cloud identity and access management service for enterprises. Businesses can use Symplified for cloud identity management, access control, single sign-on for employees, user management and auditing across any access device using a unique proxy gateway architecture deployed either in the cloud or on premises. The company provides secure access to SaaS applications like Salesforce, ADP, WebEx, Xactly, Taleo, Success Factors and many others.

Clients include HP, Blue Shield, ESPN, Forest Laboratories, Moody’s, Zynga, Netflix, Rambus and Dolby Laboratories. The company says that it tripled revenues and customer adoption last year. Symplified also has a strategic partnership with Amazon in place, and launched the Trust Cloud on Amazon Web Services to become the only provider of identity management services on Amazon’s cloud platform at the time.

Symplified will use the funds to expand operations, service and support, research and development, and marketing.

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Code 42 Software, a Minnesota-based online backup company for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, has raised $52.5 million in funding led by Accel Partners with participation from Split Rock Partners. This is the first major investment from Accel’s recently announced Big Data Fund, which is dedicated to funding infrastructure and application companies in “Big Data.” This is the first round of institutional investing for Code 42.

You may not have heard of Code 42, but the enterprise company should be on your radar. Founded by Brian Bispala, Mitch Coopet and Matthew Dornquast, Code 42 launched CrashPlan, a personal data protection and backup software, back in 2007. The intention of CrashPlan was to reinvent backup by developing an easy-to-use technology to protect data whenever and wherever it is created. After introducing CrashPlan to consumers, Code 42 decided to use this knowledge gained to develop and deliver a backup software that was enterprise-grade.

Just five years after launching CrashPlan, Code 42 now manages and protects over 100 petabytes of data globally. In addition to CrashPlan for consumers, Code 42’s product lineup includes online backup solutions for the SMB, CrashPlan PRO, and private and public cloud solutions for the enterprise, CrashPlan PROe. All of the company’s data storage and backup products are cross-platform, and provide continuous protection onsite, offsite and online.

The virtue of Code 42′s offering is that the software can be used for both public and private clouds. Dornquast explained to me in an interview that most large enterprises believe in a hybrid model, with four out of five of the company’s enterprise customers building their own private cloud as opposed to relying on an untrusted cloud.

Dornquast says that Code 42′s ‘secret sauce’ is the company has engineered its own storage technology, that allows businesses to build their own private clouds. As he explains, Code 42 is “part software company, part cloud storage company, and part managed appliance hardware company.”

Crashplan product has been deployed in over 4000 “big data” enterprise environments and customers include: Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, Intuit, NASA, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, and Stanford University. For example, Dornquast said Google has been is using Crashplan for internal data storage. While revenue was not disclosed, the company has seen 500 percent growth over the last three years, and is profitable.

Accel partner Ping Li explains that managing data on multiple devices is a challenge for both consumers and the enterprise, and being able to move this data safely and securely is becoming more and more important. With this in mind, there needs to be real technology behind this issue, he says. Li (and Accel) believes that device and information data management in the cloud is an example of a big data application ripe for disruption.

Code 42 provides a scalable and seamless multi-device “big data information management platform” to continuously protect and manage this growing data in real-time across any device.

What struck Li has being particularly unique about Code 42 (besides the technology itself) is that although the startup provides major infrastructure and helps manage massive amounts of data, the UI is lightweight and resonates with the trend of the consumerization of IT.

As Dornquast tells me, this clean, consumer product-like experience is one of the key reasons the company has been able to pull in customers like Google. The company has been able to back-up over 250 million files per day across multiple data centers  globally; and service customers from soccer moms to Fortune 100 companies.

Code 42 faces competition from Carbonite, Box and others.

The new funding will be will be used to accelerate multi-platform product development and increase sales and marketing efforts internationally.

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Tealium, which specializes in enterprise tag management solutions (more on that below), has raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from a bunch of digital marketing CEOs – and former CEOs – including Limelight Networks’ Jeff Lunsford, Collective’s JoeApprendi, eValue Group’s Thomas Falks and EyeWonder’s John Vincent.

Jim MacIntyre, founder of Visual Sciences (acquired by WebSideStory) and former chief of e-commerce technology for GSI Commerce, participated as well, and also joined Tealium’s board.

Founded in 2008, Tealium provides page tag management solutions that do not require customers to run application servers to load digital marketing vendor tags onto Web pages, relying instead on a ‘client-side’ methodology and a combination of browser caching, CDNs and proprietary tag management techniques.

The company’s tag management system, Tealium iQ, lets digital marketers and Web analytics professionals use a fairly simple drag-and-drop interface to manage all their page tags (analytics, advertising, affiliate, PPC search and whatnot) without taxing their IT departments.

Clients include Citrix, Big Fish Games, TracyLocke and US Auto Parts.

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IT infrastructure solutions provider Internap this morning announced its acquisition of privately-held Voxel, an enterprise hosting and cloud services company based in NYC, for $30 million in cash. Under the terms of the deal, an additional $5 million in cash could be put on the table over the next two years, subject to certain performance-based criteria.

Founded in 1999 in founder Raj Dutt’s dorm room, the company provides on-demand dedicated hosting and cloud services to enterprises and Web-centric businesses.

Voxel says it currently serves more than 1,000 customers and has approximately 50 employees.

The company was backed by NYC-based private equity firm Seaport Capital.

By adding Voxel’s service locations in Amsterdam and Singapore to Internap’s existing service locations, the combined company aims to offer colocation, managed hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud services to customers around the world. Internap says it will also leverage Voxel’s automation technologies and expertise to enhance existing products.

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Cyber-Ark Software, which provides identity management solutions to financial institutions and other enterprise customers worldwide, has raised a healthy $40 million in venture capital funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

Founded in 1999, Cyber-Ark had previously raised $25 million from angel investors and VCs.

The company provides information security solutions to roughly 1000 enterprise clients, enabling them to protect users, applications and data against both insider and external threats.

The company has 170 employees worldwide and is headquartered in the US, with R&D operations located in Israel.

The $40 million investment deal includes the purchase of shares from existing shareholders by Goldman Sachs and JVP, as well as the provision of growth capital for the company.

As part of the round, JVP founder and chairman Erel Margalit will be appointed chairman of the company, and Goldman Sachs VP David Campbell will be joining Cyber-Ark’s board.

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Apple is reportedly going to use part of its enormous pile of cash to buy an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that specializes in flash storage solutions. Calcalist reports – in Hebrew – that the world’s most valuable company is in talks to buy Herzliya Pituach, Israel-based Anobit for $400 million to $500 million.

If the report checks out, this would mark Apple’s first acquisition in Israel (and the first with Tim Cook at the helm as CEO), and also a rare occasion because the consumer electronics giant doesn’t usually buy non-software companies. The only hardware companies Apple is known to have acquired in the past two decades were Steve Jobs-founded NeXT, Raycer Graphics, Intrinsity and P.A. Semi.

Anobit provides flash storage solutions for enterprise and mobile markets, based on its proprietary MSP (which stands for ‘Memory Signal Processing’) technology. Its solutions are designed to improve the speed, endurance and performance of flash storage systems while driving down the cost.

Anobit’s technology is comprised of signal processing algorithms that compensate for physical limitations of NAND flash, the company claims.

Anobit does not publish a list of customers or references, but says its clients are among the world’s leading flash manufacturers, consumer electronics vendors and storage system providers.

According to Calcalist reporter Assaf Gilad, Apple relies on the company’s solutions for the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air product lines, among other devices. South Korean Hynix is said to use Anobit’s solution for a flash memory chip you can find inside the iPhone 4S.

Anobit says it has 21 granted patents (and 95 in total). The company has raised $76 million from Battery Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital and strategic investors, including Intel Capital.

Apple is likely interested in Anobit for its MSP-powered MSP20xx embedded flash controllers for smartphones and tablet computers, which can significantly boost memory performance. Last August, Anobit announced that it had shipped a remarkable 20 million of said flash controllers.

Anobit was founded in 2006 and is led by co-founder, chairman and CEO Prof. Ehud Weinstein. Prior to co-founding Anobit, Prof. Weinstein was a co-founder and CEO of Libit Signal Processing, which was acquired by Texas Instruments in 1999.

Anobit co-founder and president Ariel Maislos was previously co-founder of Passave, which was acquired by PMC Sierra in 2006. The rest of the Israeli company’s management team members also have impressive resumes, which is certainly another argument in favor of an Apple acquisition.

Calcalist reports that Anobit employs roughly 200 people today.

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Blue Coat, which specializes in Web security and WAN optimization solutions, has agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by San Francisco-based PE firm Thoma Bravo in a transaction valued at roughly $1.3 billion.

Shareholders stand to receive $25.81 per share per common stock, in cash, and Blue Coat’s board of directors has already approved the agreement. The price represents a premium of almost 50 percent over the company’s closing price on December 8, 2011.

Blue Coat’s solutions protect enterprises from Web-based security threats and for accelerating and optimizing applications and rich media content, such as video, over their networks.

The investor group that is acquiring the company is led by Thoma Bravo and includes the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan through its private investor department, Teachers’ Private Capital.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and Blue Coat expects the transaction to close in the first calendar quarter of 2012.

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