Venture Capital on Ulitzer

Year-old PHP PaaS hoster AppFog, née PHP Fog, has gotten an $8 million B round led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby, Citrix' former data center and virtualization CTO, and VC Matt Ocko as well as existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op. That makes $9.8 million altogether. Ignition gets a board seat and Ignition managing director Frank Artale will fill it. The money's earmarked for integrating broader technologies - it wants to support Node, Ruby, Python, Java and .NET - which explains why it's changed its name - and adding to the development team working on AppFog, the technology that powers PHP Fog. Industry analysts have told the start-up and its backers that Platform-as-a-Service is beginning to eclipse bare-bones Infrastructure-as-Service (IaaS) and should be in for "big growth,"... (more)

HTC Buying Dashwire

It's ostensibly to strengthen HTCSense.com's hand in mobile cloud services since the five-year-old company's Dashworks platform offers mobile and web applications for setting up and personalizing smartphones and tablets, and synchronizing content across multiple devices. However, it's suspected HTC, currently in a multi-front wrestling match with Apple over Android, wants Dashwire at least as much for its patents. Dashwire bought patents off of Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures back at the beginning of April but only for defensive purposes. HTC last month agreed to buy S3 G... (more)

Cloud Computing Provider Logicworks Selects ScienceLogic IT Management

"As enterprises with large-scale applications or content adopt cloud computing and managed services, the costs to properly monitor, analyze, and report on availability and performance become more challenging and more expensive," said Stephanie Tayengco, vice president of network operations for Logicworks. "ScienceLogic EM7 will give us a holistic view of performance across our entire hosting infrastructure and alert us to the most critical issues facing our clients. The product's comprehensiveness will enable us to pinpoint the root cause of potential problems more quickly and al... (more)

Amazon’s European Cloud Struck by Lightning

Amazon’s Web Services’ European cloud suffered an outage over the weekend due to a lightning strike to the transformer at one of its power suppliers. The outage affected its European Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) cloud services, among others. According to the AWS status page, a lightning strike hit a transformer from a utility provider to one of the availability zones (EU-WEST-1 region) in Dublin. An availability zone is a set of hardware that supports cloud services and is independent from other zones. Due to the problem, services were ‘weake... (more)

BlueBridge Networks Partners with Bluemile for Cloud Computing

"We are delivering a service based on our client's demand.  You pay for what you use, which makes our customization scalable. When our clients' needs change, we change with them" said Michael Marlowe, Bluemile President and co-founder. BlueBridge Networks, the Cleveland provider of data center services such as work group recovery, virtualization, cloud computing and managed services, has announced on Monday a multimillion-dollar joint investment with Columbus based Bluemile, Inc. to offer the most robust, scalable and secure cloud computing platform. The joint venture boasts sta... (more)