Santa Barbara, Calif.-based RightScale, which makes cloud computing management software, announced Dec. 8 that it has secured $13 million in its second round of venture capital funding. Index Ventures was the lead investor.
Undoubtedly, this has been in the works since before the Wall Street and mortgage-market implosions. Nonetheless, whenever a VC funding story comes to the fore during a sloggy financial period as we have now, it's welcome news.
This particular item also says a lot about how investors see the overall cloud computing market, which will be going nowhere but up for a while to come.
Why? Companies that have businesses to run but don't have the time and/or capital to build or refurbish their own data centers needn't worry about hardware, period. Just sign up with a cloud-services provider that suits your needs, make sure you can handle the traffic, swipe a credit card and off you go.
Using sophisticated "cloud-aware" server templates, the fully-automated RightScale platform requires little knowledge of cloud architecture to deploy, manage and scale even complex, multicloud applications, the company claims.
Rafael H. Saavedra, RightScale founder and vice-president of engineering, formerly was director of software development at Expertcity/Citrix Online, where he headed the applications group. He was the release lead of GoToMeeting.
Researcher IDC reports that over the next five years, spending on IT cloud services is expected to grow about threefold to reach a whopping $42 billion by 2012.
No question the trajectory is already in place. All the major IT companies now have -- or are in the process of formulating, like IBM -- a specific cloud-computing strategy.
For more information about RightScale cloud management, go here. To sign up for the free community version and to see some screenshots, go here.
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