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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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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Venture capital firm Battery Ventures this morning announced that it has made an investment in Continuuity, a stealth ‘big data’ startup founded by Battery entrepreneur-in-residence Todd Papaioannou (formerly VP and Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo).

Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and a group of angel investors including Bob Pasker, Paul Ambrose, Matt Ocko and The Data Collective also participated in the round.

It’s unclear what Continuuity is building, and the press release makes us none the wiser:

Continuuity’s goal is to enable the development of the next wave of real-time Big Data applications.

Ok then. Here’s a recent video interview of Papaioannou talking about trends in big data:

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In September 2010, HP acquired Fortify Software for what Forbes reported was about $265 million and was later folded into HP’s Software Division. Founded in 2003, Fortify makes products and services designed to protect companies from security threats in business software applications, and raised $40 million in 2003 from Kleiner Perkins and Sigma Partners.

Today, we’ve learned that HP Fortify and HP’s enterprise security have sustained some notable personnel losses, which stand to benefit a startup called AlienVault. Founded in 2007, the Silicon Valley-based AlienVault produces unified security management solutions for better threat management, not unlike Fortify. However, AlienVault is the creator of Open Source Security Information Management (or “OSSIM”), which provides a set of tools that allow network and security administrators to access a detailed view of their networks, hosts, devices, servers, etc.

The startup calls OSSIM the “de-facto standard open source security information and event management” system, and the solution has racked up 160,000 downloads and users in over 80 countries, with its customers primarily consisting of defense departments, government organizations, banks and enterprises. In other words, the company develops advanced cyber security products that unifies management of critical security systems and processes across the network, like vulnerability scanning, etc., for customers like the Telefonica, Metro Madrid and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company.

And Today, AlienVault has officially become the new employer of seven former Fortify and HP executives, including the appointment of Barmak Meftah as president and chief executive, and Roger Thornton as CTO. Meftah was formerly the CPO at Fortify, and Thornton is the founder and former CTO.

The new chief executive was also formerly the vice president of software security products at HP, where he led SPI Dynamics as well as Fortify after its acquisition by HP. He has also held senior management positions at Synchron, Oracle, and Price-Waterhouse. Thorton, too, is a Silicon Valley veteran, having held management roles at eBay, E*Trade, Apple, and Sun. The two together led the sale to HP in 2010.

Joining Meftah and Thornton on AlienVault’s leadership team are Jim Yares, Richard Kirk, John Richardson, Jack Marshall and Gail Boddy, all former VPs and executives at HP Fortify, with the exception of Boddy, who was vice president of human resources at HP ArcSight (ArcSight was acquired by HP in September 2010 for $1.5 billion.)

Obviously, AlienVault wasn’t going to acquire Fortify from HP, but they’ve seemingly done the next best thing. Meftah told TechCrunch that the allure was AlienVault’s technology, which he echoed is one of the more widely-deployed security information and event management solutions (SIEM) on the market.

The new chief executive said that HP Enterprise Security business is doing very well — “so it wasn’t about that” — instead he said that the market for SIEM is growing fast and that AlienVault’s solutions make it uniquely positioned to take advantage. With the level of escalated cyber attacks and hacking last year, more so than ever before organizations realize security is an issue that needs to be addressed from the top down, and SIEM, he says, is one of the fastest growing segments within the security market.

Meftah wouldn’t say whether the team is raising a big series B, but clearly there’s something good brewing over at AlienVault. For more, check them out at home here.

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Enterprise-focused cloud performance analytics company Tidemark, formerly known as Proferi, has raised $24 million in new funding led by Redpoint Ventures with existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday participating. This brings the total amount raised to more than $35 million. Redpoint partner Geoff Yang will join Tidemark’s Board of Directors.

Founded by Romanian entrepreneur Christian Gheorghe, the Tidemark Enterprise Performance Management Platform delivers real-time, risk-adjusted metrics management; strategic, financial, operational planning and forecasting; and profitability modeling applications.

Tidemark’s premise is that enterprises are investing billions yearly in traditional business intelligence systems that were not built for today’s data deluge and do not provide the forward-looking analysis that is required of businesses today.

Basically Tidemark monitors and analyzes business data, including key performance indicators, key risk indicators and other data for enterprise business planning functions. The software can produce full profit and loss reports by product, customer, supplier and channel to understand the detailed drivers of cost and improve margins.

The web applications are built with a HTML5 user interface and includes application components such as processes, goals, dimensions, KPIs, calculations, risks and controls. Tidemark also features integrations with a number of cloud and on-premise systems for sourcing structured and unstructured data including PDFs, MS Office documents and blogs.

The new funds will be used for customer acquisition.

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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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Editor’s note: This post was written by guest contributor Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. You can read his previous posts here.

One of two things is going to happen in 2012: either the world is going to end as the Mayans predicted, or people are finally going to start to see enterprise software as cool (which I have long predicted).  Now, most people will never think enterprise software is as sweet as I do; I can live with that.  Services that help you access the world’s music or connect with your entire network of friends will always win the technology popularity contest.  But we do spend an awful lot of time talking about coupons, randomized video chat (likely NSFW), and virtual bars.  I mean, these are totally cool areas of innovation, but when compared to $3.4B software acquisitions and SaaS stocks up 60%, or over-performing IPOs and more rumored to come, I’m not sure the world of enterprise software is that lacking in spice.

And yet, mentioning that you work for an enterprise software company in causal conversation is an instant buzz kill.  Try picking up a girl with that opening.  Most people would rather talk about Angry Birds or even health care policies.  To be fair, enterprise software’s stigma is not entirely undeserved.  It’s not easy to love an industry where vendors often audit their own customers to claim revenue, product updates surface three times a decade, and solution lock-in is the standard.

But these characteristics are relics of the old guard of enterprise software. Almost everything about this category—from how software is built to who’s buying it—is undergoing massive change, and many longstanding assumptions no longer apply. So I figured I’d take a stab at debunking a few enterprise software myths to help explain why 2012 will usher in a very different era for enterprise solutions, making it the year of the enterprise software startup.

Myth #1: There’s no sizzle in enterprise software

If the consumer internet is technology’s Hollywood, as SnapLogic’s Gaurav Dhillon recently suggested, then enterprise software is its Waterworks.  Or its Yanni – profitable yet dull.  At least that’s how the category is perceived. Either the services are irrelevant to us individuals, or the problems being solved are relatively esoteric, like software that helps you get better performance from your servers (oops, that turned into a $40B business).  But the cloud takes the category mainstream, letting us all participate in this world of enterprise software, and meaningfully changing how we work and communicate.  We’ve seen an explosion of end-user-centric business solutions, finally making enterprise software relevant to all of us.

A film producer, Facebook co-founder, and early employee of Pixar all have started enterprise software companies to make that happen.  Not exactly the Mr. Watson crowd.  Enterprise software today is home to far more interesting rivalries than the battle for check-ins, or ‘likes’ vs. ‘+1s’.  For instance: who’s going to dominate the enterprise email wars as they move to the cloud?  A land grab for most other markets is quickly emerging, with ‘cloud’ spending broadly estimated to become $149 billion dollars by 2015.

Myth #2: There’s no scale in enterprise software companies

Enterprise software is still mistakenly seen as a category defined by niche markets, extremely long paths to reach customers, and wildly expensive sales cycles. Crossing the Chasm outlined the original progression of software adoption: first within smaller markets, followed by expansion to larger audiences.

But the shift to the cloud explodes this model, as software is now available instantly to nearly every business in the world. And getting to them is far easier than ever before.

On day one, cloud solutions are global, horizontal, and can support companies of all sizes.  Without having to aim a direct sales force at a particular segment, you can quickly analyze and optimize for areas where adoption is happening organically, instead of having to laboriously (or blindly) chase down customers.  And with 500 million+ information workers worldwide, the question is not “is there scale?” but rather “how do you get to scale, quickly?”  Freemium, open source, and viral enterprise applications are the new distribution models.  And some companies, like Atlassian and New Relic, are audaciously doing away with the traditional sales model altogether in pursuit of volume.

Myth #3: IT organizations are slow or difficult to work with

And then there’s the process by which new technology gets implemented and “blessed” within organizations.  Steve Jobs notoriously avoided selling to big businesses due to the small number of enterprise gatekeepers, otherwise known as CIOs. Their job is to care for and manage the security, integration, maintenance, deployment, management, and support of a wide range of technology. With careers on the line for every new piece of software introduced, their interest in carefully vetting (user translation: slowly adopting) solutions is more than justified.

But after spending the past few decades dealing with delayed roll-outs, over-budget projects, and unhappy users, IT departments have had enough.  This is why they are radically speeding up the implementation process, and cloud solutions and startups are benefiting disproportionally.  Major corporations like Procter and Gamble have created IT groups charged with piloting emerging technologies to solve problems that didn’t even exist (or simply couldn’t be solved) a few years ago.

Many of the Fortune 500 are embracing a “bring your own device” to work mentality and IT model, allowing individuals to choose their own hardware and software, greatly accelerating the adoption of cutting-edge technologies.  The implications of this change are profound, as it completely rejiggers the existing information technology architecture of most organizations—from security, to apps, to the content on these devices, few existing solutions adequately solve our future problems.  And that spells opportunity.  With IT buyers getting in front of this challenge and trend, the two scarcest resources you need from your customers—budget and motivation—are about to increase dramatically.

Myth #4: It’s impossible to compete with Microsoft and Oracle

The biggest hurdle to starting an enterprise software company, or securing the funding needed to start one, has long been the (once justified) fear that Microsoft, Oracle, or some other giant could easily prevent you from getting to scale.  As these players ‘controlled’ the underlying technology platforms and distribution channels, the expectation was that you’d be bought by them at best, and brutally crushed at worst.  Not the most favorable economic terms under which to launch a new company.

But in the cloud, customers have more choices than ever before.  And these choices aren’t easily influenced by the methods Microsoft and others have mastered.  When competing applications are just a few clicks away, undercutting competitors by delaying customers is no longer a meaningful strategy.  Oft-used marketing jujitsu (FUD) doesn’t work in a world of near-instant adoption and testing of applications.  And even applications with lengthier implementation cycles are finding today’s landscape to be far more favorable to emerging players.  Companies like Workday are increasingly taking share because a premium is being placed on their ability to out-execute traditional vendors.

Increasingly some of the world’s largest enterprises are going out of their way to find solutions not delivered from the big players, instead looking exclusively for solutions from unencumbered, independent startups.  They no longer want to instruct their traditional vendors about market directions, or deal with the conflicting interests of their providers (why doesn’t Microsoft build for Android and vice-versa).  Further, most enterprises are either over-served by existing solutions’ complexity, or underserved in the areas that are most important today: mobility, social, ease of use, speed, etc.  Using focus as a competitive weapon, startups can ensure that large incumbents simply can’t respond adequately to new customer demands and waves of technology.

Myth #5: You can’t innovate in the enterprise

A longstanding fear and reality with enterprise technology has been the undue influence wielded by customers when it comes to product roadmaps, with purchasing decisions made based on a vendor’s ability to win an RFP bakeoff.  But Chris Dixon reminds us that enterprise SaaS gives users greater influence over technology adoption, leading to products that are built to be used, not sold.

This shift has dramatic implications for enterprise innovation: building to drive real user and business value, not to produce a more appealing white paper.  Software like Yammer, Do, Asana, Zendesk, and GoodData are all user-introduced services, which means they’ll only see adoption if they’re solving real problems, consistently.  Unlike traditional enterprise “systems of record,” tools today get tossed out if their utility wanes.  With increased competitiveness, democratic platforms, and lower switching costs, the slope of the product innovation curve necessary to attract and retain customers has increased considerably.

2011 ushered in the early commercialization of social applications and platforms, big data, business intelligence, and new collaborative tools in the enterprise.  Gartner bets that 2012 will be about “the convergence of cloud, social, mobile and information into a unified set of forces shaping almost every IT-related decision.”  Industry jargon aside, these innovations, and their accompanying high-growth markets, will be dominated by enterprise software companies that didn’t exist a decade ago.

So when Robert Scoble says enterprise software isn’t sexy, he’s mostly right.  But this is changing rapidly. The category is shedding its slowness and stuffiness, and the new players that are emerging to define it look nothing like their predecessors.  2012 is going to be a renaissance year for enterprise software, and everything—including, most importantly, the way we work—will be transformed along with it.

Photo credit: h.koppelaney

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Database virtualization startup Xeround has raised $9.3 million in Series C funding Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership. This brings the startup’s total funding to over $30 million.

Xeround offers a cloud database-as-a-service for MySQL-based applications. Currently the service is offered for EC2 MySQL databases, as well as Rackspace-MySQL and Heroku-MySQL applications.

Xeround’s cloud database allows service providers, ISVs and customers to run their applications in the cloud and automatically scale up or down, all while ensuring availability in the event of failure or schema changes.

The startup promises auto-scaling, elastic-usage, high availability and multi-tenancy, while guaranteeing continuous service during schema changes, resource modifications and the scaling process. Xeround’s service currently has hundreds of paying customers.

Xeround, which competes with Salesforce’s Database.com, will use the funding to expand its cloud database solution as well as further marketing and sales operations.

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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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Back in July, a new cloud computing and productivity platform called CX.com raised $5 million from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Hanna Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $10 million. This is pretty impressive considering the company largely has been flying under the radar since its launch earlier this year.

But CX is now officially ready to share the official news of their production release, a platform that enables users to backup, synchronize, share, and manage their data in the cloud — from any device to any device.

This includes the ability to sync new, changed, offline or deleted files to all connected computers, maintaining a history for all of your devices as you make changes. What’s more, users can take advantage of realtime backup, synchronized file sharing among groups, across multiple platforms, including desktops, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices.

CX’s CEO Brad Robertson tells us that, through offering a 10 GB account for free, the company isn’t just trying to launch a lame marketing tactic to entice users, the company wants to make a bolder statement about the industry: That storage and sharing companies don’t have to set a low limit in which users will quickly hit their quote and be forced to pay.

So, CX is giving away 10 GB for free and is only deducting storage space from the group creator, not every single user that the person shares with, nor does it include the size of their unlimited file revisions from their users’ quota. Free services are available for up to three groups, and users receive 10 GB of free storage. For $10 a month, customers can create 10 groups with unlimited group size and take advantage of realtime notifications, with 50 GB of storage. At $20 a month, groups are unlimited, and storage is at 100 GBs.

By being transparents about how much they charge and by offering a realtime collaboration and social graph infrastructure, CX aims to become more than a storage commodity, but a platform that enables users to discover, search, and find their content in realtime.

The new production release also offers all customers groups, even free users, with the capability to add up to 1 million members per group. The company also has a realtime notifications suite and collaboration feature set in limited beta that looks to be launched by the end of the year.

Along with its production release, CX is also announcing that it has added Keith Pardy to its management team. Pardy was the former CMO at RIM, and has previously worked at Coke as well as Nokia. Will Pardy, Chief Product Designer and architect.

CX’s new platform is available with apps for the Web, Mac, PC, iPad, and iPhone, with Android and BlackBerry releases coming before the holidays.

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