Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.

Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.

similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze petabytes of log-data a day.

Sumo Logic’s architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic’s Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.

The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.

Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.

The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.

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AppDynamics, which specializes in application performance management (APM) solutions for high-maintenance Web apps, has raised $20 million in funding in a Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Previous backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated.

With even mission-critical software applications increasingly moving to distributed, cloud-based architectures, AppDynamics’ solutions aim to assist organizations in managing such environments, helping companies like Netflix, Priceline and TiVo monitor and scale their production applications.

The company says more than 60,000 people have downloaded AppDynamics Lite, its free Java troubleshooting solution, to date.

AppDynamics has now raised $36.5 million in total.

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Silicon Valley company Bill.com, which offers Web-based bill payment, invoicing and cash management solutions for businesses, this morning announced that it has raised $15.5 million in Series D funding, bringing its total raised to over $40 million.

The financing round was led by new investor Financial Partners Fund (a unit of Citi Capital Advisors), with previous Bill.com backers DCM, Emergence Capital Partners, August Capital, Jafco Ventures and Total Technology Ventures participating.

Without sharing specific numbers, Bill.com says it has grown over 300 percent this year, with “tens of thousands of new customers and vendors” joining its network, and now more than $3 billion now under management within the Bill.com platform.

Bill.com integrates with most major accounting and banking systems, including QuickBooks online, Intacct, NetSuite, and Sage Peachtree, along with Google Apps and PayPal Business integration.

August Capital partner David Hornik makes the comparison to Jack Dorsey-led startup Square, pointing out that Bill.com “moves more money than Square each month”. Ok then!

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Virtualization data management software maker Actifio has raised $33.5 million in a Series C financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with previous backers North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Advanced Technology Ventures participating.

Founded in 2010, the startup has secured a total of $57.5 million in venture capital funding to date.

Actifio bills itself as a ‘Protection and Availability Storage’ platform company, offering data management solutions to small to medium-sized businesses, large enterprises and managed service and cloud service providers.

This is what the formal pitch sounds like:

Actifio’s mission is to virtualize management of data and consumerize the operations to enable transformation of the data center into an SLA-driven services organization.

Beginning with addressing IT’s most frustrating challenges (backup, disaster recovery and business continuity), the Actifio PAS platform is expanding to address test and development, analytics, compliance, e-discovery and other business-critical requirements, creating a new category of storage that efficiently virtualizes and manages copies of production data.

Peter Levine, a veteran enterprise IT exec (Veritas, XenSource, Citrix) and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has joined Actifio’s board.

Actifio is led by CEO Ash Ashutosh (formerly VP & chief technologist of HP’s StorageWorks division), president Jim Sullivan (previously VP, Worldwide Sales at IBM System Storage) and David Chang (formerly founder and VP of Product Management at AppIQ – acquired by HP).

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It’s been only a month since SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump left his last company, following its acquisition by Urban Airship, but he’s already launching a new product (and company) today called Sprintly. The company was actually founded in March by Stump’s co-founder Graham Blache, and Stump tells me he’s “been plotting this product for nearly a decade.”  The startup is completely bootstrapped so far.

Sprintly is a simple project management tool that is built for both software developers and other people in a company who rely on them. It is designed to remove the frustrations developers have with working in their own silo.

Traditionally, programmers use bug tracking tools and the own product-management systems, only to be bugged incessantly by non-engineers about the status of new features or fixes. Sprintly gives the non-programmers a top-level view into what the engineers are doing and how far along they are. For the developers themselves, it gives them a drag-and-drop way for keeping track of projects.

The approach reminds my of Trello, a project management service Joel Spolsky launched last September at Disrupt SF. The video demo below gives an overview of the service, which $9 per user per month after a one-month free trial.

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GramercyOne, a New York City-based provider of cloud-based business management and marketing software, has secured $14.5 million in Series A financing.

The funding round was led by Revolution Ventures (which is chaired by AOL founder Steve Case) with participation from Grotech Ventures, TDF and Jubilee Investments.

Launched in 2010, GramercyOne offers a product called Booker Platform, a swiss army knife of software tools that enable companies to attract and reach out to customers through social commerce, group buying services, mobile and local advertising and social booking solutions.

The company says it currently provides cloud services to over 2,500 companies across the globe (56 countries and counting, with eight languages supported so far).

Its customers range from small-sized service companies like local spas, fitness centers, beauty salons and whatnot to big organizations such as Hilton Worldwide.

GramercyOne claims its Booker Platform is currently used to process over 700,000 transactions – averaging $1 million in value – every day.

Says Revolution Ventures’ president, Tige Savage:

“GramercyOne allows the e-commerce revolution to move from the sale of products to
the sale of services.

The company’s leading applications finally make it as easy to purchase and schedule a service appointment online as it is to purchase a song or a book online.”

Savage will be joining GramercyOne’s board of directors together with Grotech’s Don Rainey; the two also serve on the board of LivingSocial.

Interestingly, GramercyOne was started after its SpaBooker platform was carved out as a business division within SpaFinder, a major spa media and marketing company.

According to the company, the functionality required to enable online scheduling of spa appointments was starting to gain traction outside of the spa industry, and thus the SpaBooker division was spun out in to what is now GramercyOne.

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Oracle has acquired Endeca, a company that powers enterprise search for large companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Endeca has raised a total of $65 million from Bessemer, Venrock, Intel, SAP, Ampersand Capital Partners, DN Capital and Lehman Brothers.

Endeca’s core technology enables companies to correlate and analyze unstructured data and provides enterprise search for large companies including Borders, Boeing, the Census Bureau, the EPA, Ford, Hallmark, IBM, and Toshiba. The company specializes in guided search, and auto-categorizing results based on the keywords someone enters. Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.

Endeca’s InFront offering allows businesses with tools for advanced merchandising and content targeting for e-commerce. And Endeca Latitude enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications that draw information and data from unstructured and structured sources together.

Oracle says that the combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to more advanced enterprise data management platform. Companies will be able to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together. For example, Oracle says the combination of Oracle’s own commerce application, ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. And Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering and Endeca Latitude will be combined as well to give businesses a more powerful analytics platform.

Endeca currently has over 600 customers.

Other recent Oracle acquisitions include Pillar Systems, and Fatwire Software.

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Vitrue, a social media marketing company, is rolling out version 3.0 of its social media management platform for brands. New features include localization and enhanced analytics and metrics within one dashboard interface.

As we’ve written in the past, Vitrue’s SaaS platform allows brands and marketing agencies to
communicate with fans and consumers across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, location based services, and via mobile applications. The company’s SRM (social relationship management) platform is being used by a number of high profile brands including Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Purina, McDonald’s, YouTube, Ford, AT&T, Disney and Best Buy.

The newest version of Vitrue’s software comes with a new dashboard and user interface, allowing marketers to see, access and manage all of the available functionalities, tools and modules within one interface. The company has also added enhanced analytics and metrics to give marketers specific metrics on demographics and engagement of their social pages and users including insight into traffic sources, overall user demographics, top fan profiles, fan growth breakdowns, top location snapshots, per-post publishing metrics, and user engagement statistics by action (i.e., like, comment, share, play, etc.) and by day of week and time of day.

Other features include the ability to publish targeted content to specific users, the ability to add coupons, quizzes, and more to campaigns, and 24-7 customer support.

Vitrue, which has raised $32 million,
faces competition from Buddy Media.

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Is IBM making up for lost time? After acquiring crime data intelligence software developer i2 yesterday, Big Blue is announcing another purchase this morning. The company is buying Canadian risk management analytics software developer Algorithmics for $387 million.

Algorithmics’ risk analytics software, content and advisory services are used by banks, investment and insurance businesses to help assess risk, address regulatory requirements and make more insightful business decisions. Basically, the software quantifies, manages and optimizes company risk exposure across a range of financial risk domains including market, liquidity, credit, operational and insurance risk as well as economic and regulatory capital risk.

The company has more than 350 clients, including 25 of the top 30 banks and a number of leading insurers, use Algorithmics’ analytics software and advisory services. Clients include The Allianz Group, BlueCrest, HSBC, Nedbank, Nomura, Societe Generale, and Scotia Capital.

IBM says that the acquisition will expand the company’s business analytics offerings for the financial services industry. Algorithmics’ risk analytics software and services will be paired with risk compliance technologies IBM acquired from OpenPages last year to provide clients with a range of business analytics software solutions.

IBM is making a big bet on business analytics, and has spent $14 billion on acquisitions in this area in the past five years. And Big Blue’s Business Analytics and Optimization team has more than 8,000 consultants including 200 mathematicians with more than 500 patents and a network of analytics solution centers.

As we wrote yesterday, this is only one of a handful of acquisitions IBM has made this year. Unlike 2010 (IBM spent $6 billion to acquire 17 companies in 2010), 2011 has been a relatively low-key year for IBM in terms of buying companies. This year’s purchases include real estate software company Tririga. But considering the past two days of purchases, perhaps IBM is set to begin a shopping spree in the second half of 2011.

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6fusion, a provider of cloud infrastructure management software and services, this morning announced that it has raised $7 million in a Series B round of funding led by Grotech Ventures.

Previous backer Intersouth Partners also participated in the round.

The company provides an end-to-end cloud management platform that enables global workload distribution by turning companies’ public and private clouds into pay-per-use billable utilities.

6fusion has developed a metering algorithm, dubbed the Workload Allocation Cube, which it says standardizes the quantification of supply and demand for compute resources.

The company’s UC6 Cloud Management Platform federates private data center and third party cloud operators, providing a single console to allow IT organizations to meter, manage and optimize hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Lawson DeVries of Grotech Ventures will join 6fusion’s board.

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