Zendesk, the cloud-based help desk, has gotten $60 million in added financing split between $45 million in equity and $15 million in debt.
That gives it a total of $70.5 million in equity backing since it started in 2007.
Redpoint Ventures led the D round. New investors include Index Ventures, GGV Capital and Goldman Sachs. Existing investors Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners also kicked in.
Silicon Valley Bank is providing the debt financing.
The start-up wanted the money for global expansion, talent and development. It’s rebuilding its widgetry from the ground up but will reportedly keep the old application around to placate customers who hate change. The remake will tie into third-party systems like Salesforce.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Managing the Consolidation of Data in the Cloud
IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and with the Intel Cloud Builder and Intel Cloud Finder programs, which help people build cloud infrastructure as well as deploy cloud services. These tools together give Enterprise IT decision-makers information they need to plan both private cloud build out and public cloud service integration into their IT departments.
Data Is the New Perimeter for Cloud Security
The cyber security market in 2012 is estimated at $60 billion, yet adding more and more layers of perimeter security may lead to a false sense of security and be completely useless against a determined system administrator working on the inside. The end result is that your data might be secure or it might not – you simply have no way to prove it.
Shawn Henry, FBI veteran of 24 years and now president of CrowdStrike Services had this to say about integrity at the Black Hat conference this year: “These days, you can’t just protect the information from being viewed. You also need to protect it from being changed or modified.”
This leads to the question: Would you know if an attacker or your own system administrator got to your data?
Traditionally, the ‘integrity’ component of the CIA triad of data security [confidentiality, integrity, availability] has focused on protecting the integrity of data. But proving the integrity of data – knowing you have not been compromised – is equally if not more important.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Address Your Big Data Needs with the Cloud
As data continues to grow at unprecedented rates, businesses are struggling to keep up with storage needs and requirements. A new type of cloud has emerged that helps manage information – Cloud 2.0, which puts the control of cloud hosting environments into the hands of business professionals. Now, companies can focus on their core business instead of on their IT delivery model – while still achieving control, flexibility, reliability and cost efficiency.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Robert Miggins, the senior vice president of business development for PEER 1 Hosting, will explain how the cloud can help meet your data needs by leveraging features such as resource pool allocation, and auto-scaling.
How much cloud storage do you really need?
The unlimited ability to store data in the cloud is something of a dream come true for organizations that previously struggled to meet capacity requirements and keep up with fast-growing data stores, but lately, some new questions have arisen: How much cloud storage space do you really need? What data should you keep, and what should you throw away?
How can you evaluate your existing storage infrastructure to estimate your cloud storage needs? Answering these questions doesn’t have to be complicated; you just have to ask yourself what your needs are and be honest about the answers.
There are some basic cloud storage capacity planning questions that need to be answered. Rick Cook, a TechTarget writer, outlines the available capacity planning tools available and talks at length about how to best estimate your needs. He recommends asking five simple questions.
· What data storage capacity planning tools do you have …
Cloud Computing: A Quiet Game Changer in Education
Cloud computing is increasingly changing the education landscape.
Thanks to could computing, students from different locations around the world can collaborate on assignments, rendering them interactive among their peers in education.
The ability to bring together students and teachers via device and to enable them to accomplish entire learning tasks as if they were together in one classroom is just one benefit of cloud computing in education.
Yet this is not even the entire capability of the cloud effect in education. There is the whole aspect of ‘information durability’ which allows information to be stored in the cloud indefinitely, according to CloudTweaks.com.
Many schools have moved their resources online with libraries filled with hundreds of thousands of books that students can access at any time. The advent of online video has made the idea of cloud in education even more exciting because schools can produce teaching videos in any subject, upload them to their libraries in the cloud, and make them available to their students, according to the article.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Prepare Your Enterprise IT Talent for the Cloud
One of the cloud’s biggest draws is the capability to virtualize computing resources, allowing it to be consumed with the click of a mouse. But behind that simple click is an enormous infrastructure challenge that has recently been cited as a major cause for slower enterprise adoption. Enterprises can better prepare for this shift and take full advantage of future computing benefits. Between architecture design and migration planning, the road can be long, so what do you do with your talent?
In her General session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Technical Sales at Rackspace, will discuss how you can best prepare your IT talent for this seismic shift in computing.
Cloud Computing: Citrix Backs CumuLogic
Citrix has put an undisclosed amount of money in CumuLogic, the angel-backed private Java Platform-as-a-Service start-up founded last year by Sun Microsystems veterans with Java’s father James Gosling as an advisor.
Citrix took the money out of its Citrix Startup Accelerator fund, which invests in early stage start-ups.
By transforming virtualized environments and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds into a high-value PaaS cloud, CumuLogic technology is said to simplify the development, deployment and runtime management of mobile, web and enterprise Java applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Big Data Analytics: Thinking Outside of Hadoop
In the recent release of ‘2012 Hype Cycle Of Emerging Technologies,’ research analyst Gartner evaluated several technologies to come up with a list of technologies that will dominate the future . “Big Data” related technologies form a significant portion of the list, in particular the following technologies revolve around the concept and usage of Big Data.
These areas are just representative but in general many of the emerging technologies revolve around the ability to process large amounts of data from hither to unconventional sources and extract meaning out of them.
Citrix Fosters Innovation with Investment in Cloud Startup CumuLogic
Citrix Startup Accelerator, a corporate initiative investing in early stage startups, today announced an investment in CumuLogic, an innovative new Cloud Application Platform software provider that enables enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs to develop and deploy Java applications in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Focused on entrepreneur-led innovation, the Citrix Startup Accelerator program provides seed investments, office space, and mentorship to select startups from around the world, enabling them to benefit from the global Citrix presence, its entrepreneur-friendly environment, large customer base and seasoned go-to-market strategies. The IT landscape is in a period of dramatic change, shifting expectations, and transformational new computing capabilities. As mobile workstyles and cloud services redefine the technology landscape, many of the best ideas will come from innovative startups with the flexibility to approach programs in entirely new ways. The Citrix Startup Accelerator is designed to tap into the innovation of most promising of these entrepreneurs, while helping them come to market successfully.
CumuLogic was selected by Citrix because of its unique ability to bridge between traditional datacenters and clouds at the application level. As a result, enterprises and cloud providers can begin deploying enterprise-class applications in cloud environments today, without waiting for all the development standards to evolve and mature. By transforming virtualized environments and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds into a high-value Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, CumuLogic technology simplifies the development, deployment and runtime management of mobile, web and enterprise applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.
