Benchmark Capital

Cotendo, provider of cloud-based acceleration technologies, announced today the completion of a $17 million private funding round that will fuel the company’s “long-term growth strategy and continued technology innovation in the delivery of highly-personalized dynamic content for mobile and web applications”.

In addition, the funds will be used to continue Cotendo’s global expansion into new markets and fast growing regions around the world.

Strategic investors and new business partners Citrix Systems and Juniper Networks, through its Junos Innovation Fund, participated in this round of funding along with existing venture backers Sequoia, Benchmark and Tenaya Capital.

The synergy between the services and technologies of Citrix Systems and Cotendo blend on-premise physical and virtual appliances, content acceleration and cloud services that will accelerate and optimize delivery from the end user all the way to the enterprise over distributed networks, thereby improving end user experience from any location to any device.

The relationship between Juniper Networks and Cotendo will address the demand of service providers for technologies that will enable them to offer value added services and over-the-top services to content providers. This includes mobile carriers, large ISPs, and telecom companies that buy products to serve enterprise customers.

Cotendo will also launch and commercialize its new Mobile Acceleration Suite, and announced today the new frontier of acceleration services, ensuring fast and reliable delivery of mobile content regardless of location, device, or application.

With this funding round Cotendo will embark on a rapid sales and business development expansion in Asia-Pacific and Latin America to address the growing demand for mobile content acceleration services in places where the Smart Phone frequently replaced the PC as a primary computing and networking vehicle.

(Via TechCrunch)

Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.