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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US-based desktop virtualization software maker DeskStream has acquired Northern Irish cloud start-up WorldDesk, the companies are set to announce today at CES in Las Vegas. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close this quarter, were not disclosed.

Interestingly, the acquisition will see DeskStream adopt the WorldDesk name and branding.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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Exclusive - I first learned about hosted business intelligence software startup RJMetrics a few weeks ago, when Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg wrote how he made creative use of their software suite for his latest fundraising round; in fact he said he liked it so much he asked to invest in the company.

Fast forward to today: RJMetrics has landed $1.2 million in seed financing from Goldberg, early-stage VCs including SoftTech VC, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Zelkova Ventures, and other angel investors such as Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg.

In addition, Jason Goldberg has joined the Philadelphia startup’s board of directors.

Founded in January 2009 by Robert J. Moore (the ‘R’) and Jake Stein (the ‘J’), RJMetrics was bootstrapped to date and managed to get to profitability by selling subscriptions for its hosted business intelligence software to organizations that operate database-driven websites (mostly e-commerce companies, SaaS vendors, social media organizations and online content providers).

Basically, RJMetrics provides tools for database analysis, enabling its customers to extract data from their business and transform it into a more suitable format for analysis and providing them with the means to turn it into beautiful, actionable charts.

Moore and Stein were both formerly employed by venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, so they knew that they’d be better off waiting as long as possible before raising outside capital, and only agreed to take on investors when they were absolutely sure that it would “generate positive returns”.

For one, they say, almost 100 percent of this seed funding round came from firms or individuals who have used RJMetrics’ product extensively, which is always a big plus.

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Big consumer brands generate all sorts of consumer interest and expertise, but they’ve generally struggled to capitalize on these relationships to improve themselves. Lithium has been building itself into a market leader at solving this problem over the last ten years, offering white-label community sites and related products that allow brands to let users share ideas with each other — and tell the brands what they’re doing well, or not.

The company is now doubling down on its business, raising a $53.4 million fourth round of funding on top of the $39 million that it has previously brought in.

The competition has been heating up as more brands wake up to the value of user-generated content, with relatively established competitors like Bazaarvoice, Jive Software and Get Satisfaction being joined by newer entrants that have focused on the Facebook platform, like Buddy Media and Vitrue. This additional money will help Lithium build up more of a lead, especially on Facebook where it is relatively new.

New chief executive Rob Tarkoff tells me that the additional funding will go towards doubling the employee headcount from the 200 or so it currently has through hiring and acquisitions (like Scout Labs in 2010). Its existing set of products include support sites and forums, including game mechanics and social ranking features to encourage quality participation, and analytics software to help brands understand what their consumers care about. Beyond building out sales and marketing efforts in the US and around the world, and continuing to invest in its core products, you should look for it to move into adjacent areas.

It only launched its Facebook product in May, for example, which mainly meant introducing its technology for identifying and promoting top users. But maybe it will expand the products it has available for pages — page apps, possibly, or more ways of buying Facebook ads to help page engagement? Tarkoff didn’t confirm that line of speculation, other than to say they were potential new opportunities.

Tarkoff himself has been at the company for around 100 days, having previously been an executive at Adobe, in charge of its digital enterprise solutions businesses. The new round of funding is being led by new investor NEA, with SAP Ventures also getting in, as well as all of the existing investors — Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

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uTest, which provides software developers with a variety of testing services for their Web, desktop and mobile applications, has raised $17 million in Series D funding in a round led by QuestMark Partners. The new capital will be used to launch new tools to aid developers, and to open more offices in the United States – namely Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas (for starters).

QuestMark co-invested with earlier uTest backers Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital and Mesco, at double the valuation of the company’s $13 million Series C round. The startup has secured more than $37 million since its inception in 2007.

uTest says part of the fresh funding will be used for mergers and acquisitions.

The company basically provides “in-the-wild” testing services that span the entire development lifecycle for any software application through a series of crowd-sourced testings, including functional, security, localization and usability testing.

uTest says it currently has a community of 45,000+ testers readily available from 180 countries to put Web, mobile and desktop apps to the test on “real devices under real-world conditions”.

Customer includes well-known global brands like Google, Microsoft, Groupon, AOL and the BBC.

Looks like uTest’s got its work cut out for it, too:

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Hewlett-Packard has acquired a German company called HIFLEX, based in Aachen, which develops software that helps companies in the print and media industries automate their business and technical processes.

HIFLEX products include HIFLEX MIS (Management Information System), HIFLEX Print Support and an open web-to-print system dubbed HIFLEX Webshop.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Dan Kaplan, who leads Product Marketing for Twilio and writes occasionally about the extrapolation of the present into the future. Before Twilio, he worked as a contractor in Product Marketing for Salesforce. Follow him @dankaplan or find him on Quora.

You’ve got to hand it to Salesforce: The big battleship of Cloud CRM is remarkably adept at turning its boat around to make war against the startups aiming torpedoes at its hull.

First, it was Yammer.

Flash back to the 2008 TechCrunch50: Yammer enters the market with a bold play: Build an enterprise collaboration app around the status update and newsfeed mechanic, give most of it away for free to let individual teams test it out, and then acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up. Once you’ve got the users and the attention of their bosses, (so the logic goes), you leverage what you’ve launched into a platform that can support a wide range of apps. Some of these apps you build yourself, some you open up to third parties.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, judging the competition, saw Yammer on stage and said, “I really like this company the best”.

Fast forward one year to Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2009 conference, and Benioff is announcing Chatter, a status update and newsfeed app that integrates with Salesforce CRM but otherwise looks an awful lot like Yammer.

Fast forward again to this year’s Dreamforce conference, and Yammer is handing out free Starbucks coupons outside Moscone Conference Center and making a big deal about its new ability to integrate with Salesforce.

Whether or not Salesforce’s entry has made a meaningful dent in Yammer’s enterprise-domination ambitions is an open question, but it seems that Chatter was a depth charge intended for Yammer’s submarine.

This time, it’s Asana.

At the beginning of this month, after almost three full years in development, Asana (a startup founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, and early Facebook employee, Justin Rosenstein) launched to the public with an ambitious but now familiar play: Build a team collaboration app (this one around to-do lists and projects), give most of it away for free, acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up and leverage that foundation into a platform that can solve a wide range of businesses’ needs.

Fast forward to literally five days later and Salesforce is announcing Do — a simple collaborative to-do list for teams and projects that integrates with Salesforce’s CRM and looks an awful lot like … Asana.

Yet again, Salesforce heard a ping on its radar. Yet again, the battleship shifted course to attack the enemy submarine. But with Asana, Salesforce now finds itself up against an entirely different, more menacing foe, one whose capabilities are a more dangerous threat than those of the one it faced before.

The thin edge of the wedge.

If you’re wondering how some project management app — even one built by Facebook rockstars — could possibly represent even a minor risk to the master of cloud CRM, consider this brief history of Salesforce.

When Salesforce launched its automation app in 2000, it was essentially a content management system for sales contact records. Armed with this core, Marc Benioff’s marketing genius, and the advantages of the cloud, Salesforce pushed its way into the enterprise through the sales department’s door.

From there, the company has tried hard to take its original product and use it as a platform to launch new applications and empower third-party developers to launch even more. (This is what Chris Dixon cleverly coined the “thin edge of the wedge” strategy: You slide your way into the market’s cracks with one thing, than push on that edge until you’ve busted the whole market wide open.)

One problem Salesforce faces with executing this strategy is that the thin edge of CRM does not abstract particularly well into other problems. Sure, you can bolt things on (like tasks or a social newsfeed) but when it comes down to it, you’re dealing with a core framework that was built to handle customer record data and metadata and not much else.

Salesforce CRM, after all, is basically just a browser-based version of software that originated long before the Web became a full-fledged platform and way, way before the Web went mobile. You can push the CRM framework from its roots in sales into customer support, but if you try to push it much further, you’re going to start crashing into walls.

The other problem is that, as even diehard Salesforce fans will point out, the underpinnings of Salesforce’s user experience are a relic from the early days of the cloud. “Wouldn’t it be great”, you can’t help but say to yourself as you wait for a screen or interaction in Salesforce to load, “if something came along that cracked the core problems of CRM but whose interface didn’t slow me down?”

Enter Asana, stage left, with arguably the quickest, most adaptable project management app on the Web. Behind the surface of Asana’s collaborative to-do list is a real-time interface and a tremendously ambitious vision: To make collaboration so fluid, effortless and fast that the software eventually becomes the standard conduit between humanity and the work it needs to get done. Underpinning Asana is a highly-flexible data model constructed entirely around managing tasks.

Unlike customer records (or social sharing plus manual status updates, for that matter) tasks form the core of everything we aim (or should aim) to do at our jobs. Unlike CRM, you can abstract a properly-designed task framework across every function and every line of work. Among other things, you can go after ticket management for customer support, applicant tracking for HR, bug tracking for IT and, of course, CRM for sales (indeed, there are already companies using Asana for some of these things).

If you want to find a thin edge that can expand into the entire enterprise, collaborative task management is a great place to start. The founders of Asana know this, which is why they are doing what they are doing.

Which brings us back to Salesforce’s Do. Do is the first Salesforce app built on Heroku, coded in Rails and written in HTML5. Thanks in part to the platforms it’s built on, Do works well on mobile devices and is generally much faster and more responsive than the mainstay Salesforce apps built on Force.com. But despite these advances, Do’s design is less carefully considered than that of Asana; its interactions less meticulously crafted; its interface not realtime.

When you play with both apps, it becomes clear that Asana’s team has devoted more time thinking through the problems surrounding collaboration and building the intellectual and technological horsepower necessary to tackle these problems head-on.

In co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, respectively, Asana’s got Facebook’s original architect and the guy who has us pressing “Like” buttons all over the web. In Kenny Van Zant, Asana has the man who built Solar Winds’ bottom-up marketing strategy and knows how to penetrate the enterprise with freemium models like the back of his hand.

Despite Salesforce’s agility and the best sales and marketing machine in tech, it’s going to be hard for Do to win. The app is up against a killer team with an expansive vision, a solid product foundation, and a deep understanding of the problems at hand. If Salesforce wants to protect its core business from Asana’s eventual, inevitable assault, the CRM juggernaut will have to empower Do’s team to do remarkable things, up to and including the cannibalization of Salesforce CRM. So the question becomes: Will the Salesforce battleship, facing down an upstart nemesis, have what it takes to defend against the Asana submarine?

The question is a big one, so break out your popcorn: The war for the future of enterprise software is officially on.

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Bsecure, a provider of online family protection software, has been acquired by Internet and mobile security giant AVG Technologies.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Bsecure says it has provided cloud-based technology and parent controls software in the Internet filtering industry since 2001. The company has long been a partner of AVG partner in offering parental control products.

Related: AVG Acquires Mobile Security Startup DroidSecurity

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On the heels of inking a major partnership agreement with Adobe, OptiMine Software has secured $3.6 million in a Series B round of funding led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Perhaps the investor is looking to pull off another Omniture (the VC firm invested early in the web analytics and search marketing software company, which was sold to Adobe for around $1.8 billion two years ago).

OptiMine offers keyword bid optimization software for large paid-search advertising programs, using predictive analytics to maximize their performance (see demo video below).

The company was originally founded in 2008 and went on to raise $1.1 million in Series A funding in a round led by Calumet Venture Fund last year. Calumet also participated in the Series B round.

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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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