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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Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact details as to what Numecent is developing are not known, beyond a general description of what “cloudpaging” means, as provided by the company.

The term “cloudpaging,” says Numecent, refers to a specific (and patented) “push-pull” paging technology which allows software instructions and data to be demand-paged from the cloud in real-time. The company claims that cloudpaging will allow any software, app or game to pull this data on-demand to any connected device in a secure, metered and virtualized fashion. The company is even positioning cloudpaging as the successor to streaming, and holds 10 patents for application streaming and virtualization through its subsidiary, Endeavours Technologies. It’s also worth mentioning that Endeavors Technologies was spun out of a think tank for a DARPA project.

Numecent is also now claiming to have high-profile testers who have begun to deploy its hybrid-cloud solution in mission-critical environments. The company plans to exit stealth in March, at which time the company will reveal more details about the cloudpaging technology itself and how it’s being used.

Alongside the funding news, Numecent also announced that Osman Kent, previously the co-founder of 3Dlabs, has joined the company as the new CEO.

Earlier this month, Numecent launched an “application jukebox” for Red Hat, which allows traditional Windows applications to be delivered to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-hosted desktops.

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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 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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One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies is Sydney-based Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development (including JIRA and Confluence). CEO Scott Farquhar and president Jay Simons were in New York City last week talking to investment bankers exploring an eventual IPO and dropped by the TCTV studio.

Revenues for calendar year 2011 (which is different than its fiscal year) were $102 million, up 35 percent, Farquhar tells me in the video. And the company has been profitable for years. The company employs 450 people worldwide, mostly in Sydney and San Francisco, where it just opened cavernous new offices. But none of them are in sales. “We have no sales people,” says Farquhar.

Atlassian was bootstrapped for 8 years before it took a huge $60 million dollop of venture capital from Accel in 2010. The company boasts 17,000 paying enterprise customers with between 5 million and 10 million daily active users.

In October, Atlassian dramatically reduced its entry-level pricing from $150 a month for 10 users to $10 a month for 10 users. Watch the video to learn more.

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Marketing process automation software vendor Neolane has secured $27 million in funding in a round led by Battery Ventures, an investor in companies like Groupon, ExactTarget, Marketo, Bazaarvoice, Lotame and BlueKai.

Previous Neolane backers Auriga Partners, XAnge and board member Gilles Queru also participated in the round.

Neolane sells a centralized system that helps marketers and business owners track and manage marketing activity data from all across the board, thus enabling them to generate targeted messaging and relevant offers based on customer behavior and preferences.

The company says 400 B2C and B2B customers (including divisions of Fortune 500 organizations) rely on its marketing technology today, and that they’ve achieved profitability in 2011, after a decade in business. Alcatel-Lucent, Barnes & Noble, Orange and Sony Music are some of its clients.

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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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Mindspeed Technologies, a provider of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, this morning announced that it has acquired UK-based Picochip, a supplier of integrated system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for small cell base stations.

Mindspeed is paying $51.8 million for Picochip, a mix of cash and stock, and up to $25 million in earn-out payments in the first calendar quarter of 2013.

Here’s how the company pitches the move to shareholders and the press:

Together, Mindspeed and Picochip will offer the most comprehensive portfolio of base station semiconductor solutions on the market, from residential to enterprise to pico/metro applications.

Through this timely combination, Mindspeed’s enhanced product roadmap for single- and multi-mode 3G/4G solutions will enable it to capitalize on the rapid acceleration of the small cell wireless base station market, while also addressing comprehensive support for all 3G and 4G global air interface standards.

Mindspeed says it will cough up $27.5 million in cash, financed in part with bank debt, plus roughly 5.19 million in shares (approximately 15 percent of outstanding Mindspeed shares) for a total of $24.3 million. The transaction is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2012.

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