Fresh out of stealth mode, Nicira has already attracted AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

From the official company pitch:

NVP was designed to address the shortcomings of traditional networks by offering a platform that provides the operational model of a virtual machine. While applications have been decoupled from servers through compute virtualization, they have not yet been decoupled from the network through any type of scalable network virtualization. As a result, virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed.

These limitations restrict workload mobility, thus lowering resource utilization of servers, a primary cause of operational overhead. Legacy approaches can leave as much as 20%-30% of the server capacity in data centers under utilized and drive up networking costs several fold, based on Nicira’s work with the largest cloud data center operators.

NVP forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities such as stateful firewalling.

These virtual networks can be created dynamically to support VM mobility anywhere within or between data centers without service disruption or address changes.

Will people really call it the ‘VMware of networking’, then? Likely.

NVP software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly.

Nicira was founded by networking research leaders Martin Casado and Nick McKeown from Stanford University and Scott Shenker from University of California.

The company has raised $50 million in funding to date, from the aforementioned venture capital firms as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff.

With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The company now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University.

In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet, its IT automation solution for system administrators.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

Central to the company’s new SMB initiative is the release of an all-new version of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box, the all-in-one virtual desktop solution designed specifically for SMBs.

VDI-in-a-Box 5 is the first Citrix release of this desktop virtualization product following the acquisition of Kaviza in May 2011. In addition, Citrix announced a new solution combining Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and the Citrix GoToManage cloud-based support offering, making it easy for managed service providers and IT staff to remotely monitor and support virtual desktop deployments at multiple sites or customer locations.

Citrix also announced a new channel partner specialization for the Citrix Solution Advisor Program, called SMB Specialist. They will have access to an extensive set of sales tools, free online training and pre-sales support focused specifically on helping them successfully engage and service SMB customers.

Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5 will be released this quarter. A free technology preview trial is available here.

Through this alliance, Cisco and Citrix will drive innovations that simplify the deployment of high-definition virtual desktops and applications and improve end-user experiences over a Citrix HDX-enabled Cisco network.

The companies will also continue to enhance and build upon their data center solutions and cloud technologies to help accelerate deployment of cloud services.

In addition, the two companies will invest in joint go-to-market activities that will focus on driving primary product and services demand in high growth market areas such as desktop virtualization and cloud markets.

Platform Computing offers cluster and grid management software for distributed computing environments.

The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Platform Computing management software helps clients create, integrate and manage shared computing environments that are used in resource-intensive applications such as simulations, computer modeling and analytics. These technical and high performance computing (HPC) applications fuel product development, critical business decisions and breakthrough science in financial services, manufacturing, digital media, oil and gas, life sciences, government, and research and education.

Platform Computing currently serves over 2,000 clients including 23 of the top 30 largest global enterprises. Example customers include CERN, Citigroup, Infineon, Pratt & Whitney, Red Bull Racing, Sanger Institute, Statoil and University of Tokyo.

Platform Computing’s operations as of the closing will be integrated into IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Platform Computing has approximately 500 employees worldwide.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90′s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”. Feel free to dive into the full take from Brian Steven on Gluster.

Founded in 2005, Gluster’s goal was to simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.

“We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community.  Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”
“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

In September 2008, Red Hat already acquired Qumranet, Inc. including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE offering, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which together presented a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. With the addition of Gluster to KVM Red Hat now seems to aim at offering a cloud platform too. Interesting times ahead in the crowded cloud market.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Gluster, a privately-held company, for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives.  The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

SlideRocket and Socialcast’s mobile applications address a need to equip the connected enterprise with user-centric communication and collaboration tools that enhance business outcomes.

SlideRocket transforms presentations to better fit the needs of today’s enterprise with enhanced graphic capabilities, analytics and viewing patterns, real-time feedback, social media integration, and mobile functionality that drive deeper levels of engagement, audience participation and retention.

With the new, free SlideRocket Player iPad app, users can share engaging presentations, whether presenting to an audience across the table or across the globe. People can also invite someone to view a presentation from a simple link.

Available in the coming weeks, the new Socialcast iPad and updated Android app enables people to access their Socialcast community while on the road. Employees will be able to collaborate with co-workers from anywhere: posting updates, sharing files and connecting on important work projects.

In addition, Socialcast will support secure login via OAuth 2.0.

Total revenue for the quarter was $281.3 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $238.3 million, up 28% year-over-year.

GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $52.5 million, or 18.7% operating margin. After adjusting for stock compensation and amortization expenses as detailed in the tables below, non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $76.4 million, up 41% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 27.2%, up 250 basis points from the year ago quarter.

Net income for the quarter was $40 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, compared with $23.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter.

Operating cash flow was $77.1 million for the second quarter, as compared to $64.3 million in the year ago quarter. At quarter end, the company’s total deferred revenue balance was $813.2 million, an increase of 25% on a year-over-year basis.

Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of August 31, 2011 was $1.3 billion.

The company also announced that Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat, has joined its Board of Directors and that Robert MacFarlane, former VP and Director, Technology Asset Management of Wells Fargo, has joined the company as its new CTO.

The additional equity funding will be used to accelerate product development and scale sales and marketing infrastructure to support growing market demand for the company’s Blueprint4IT Lifecycle Suite of software products.

The investors previously invested $10 million in October 2010.

Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The addition of CloudNucleus strengthens Vembu’s offerings in the areas of business continuity and disaster recovery, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Bare Metal Recovery (BMR), and protection of virtualized environments and will enhance the ability of Vembu’s service provider partners to offer a superior backup service to their customers.

Further, CloudNucleus’ technical capability, and service delivery will complement Vembu’s established channel and enhance its ability to serve partners and their customers around the globe.

Vembu intends to integrate the technology and operations of CloudNucleus into its existing operations.

Srivatsan Venkatesan will join Vembu as Vice President of Product Management, Storage Products. Vembu and CloudNucleus will integrate engineering and development functions to accelerate the development and delivery of their data protection solutions.