Pertino raises $8.85M to create a new cloud networking

Pertino looks to business networks as the next step in building the cloud

A young cloud networking group, Pertino, Inc., announced its that it secured $8.85 million for its Series A round of venture funding. This round of capital was led with Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

Pertino, founded in 2011, is attempting to reinvent business networking for the cloud by building a system that is simple, secure and flexible based on business needs (especially businesses with limited IT experience, staff and funds). 

“The cloud and ‘as-a-service’ delivery models have transformed the IT landscape from a computing, storage and application perspective while, at the same time, the network paradigm has changed little,” Craig Elliott, CEO of Pertino Networks said. “As a result, networks that once enabled businesses now constrain them when it comes to harnessing the disruptive capabilities and economies of the cloud. Pertino Networks was founded to radically simplify and alter the economics of business networks by bringing them into the cloud era.”

While the market for cloud-based IT infrastructure and services already seems fierce, it appears to only be gaining momentum. One July 2011 report published by market research firm In-Stat, stated that businesses in the United States will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services by 2014, of which IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) related spending is forecasted to reach triple digit annual growth to $4 billion.

Pertino is looking to use its newly acquired funds to expand engineering and go-to-market resources.

Pertino Networks has built a team of executives and innovators from companies such as Packeteer, BlueCoat and Mercury Interactive. 

Headquartered in Cupertino, where the name gains its root, the young company is poised to fight alongside companies such as Cisco, HP, NetApp, and VMware.

As companies continue to build their IT systems into the cloud, Saas and Iaas companies will bolster their offerings to reduce the overhead cost and mobilize what is actually needed to run a business.

Earlier this month, cloud service consulting company Appirio announced that it raised $60 million for its Series-D round of funding.  Appirio, which is focused on accelerating cloud-powered business solutions so that companies can better integrate services from Salesforce.com, Google and Workday into their daily actions, also helps business find the right IT services to function in an entirely mobile environment -- if needed. 

The five-year-old company has also added a focus on cloud app development in order to build apps that tie together multiple cloud services and social networks.

Appirio's technology-enabled professional services are supported by a team of nearly 500 cloud experts and CloudSpokes, a 35,000+ person-strong global cloud developer community. 

Essentially, Appirio helps shift businesses away from in-house IT departments and run it solely in the cloud.

Appirio intends to use the money to develop its technology and support Cloudspokes -- its crowdsourced cloud app development service that hosts hackathons for developers. 

Appirio  is in the same market as Bluewolf, Accenture, Cloud Sherpas, and Cloud Technology Partners, but Appirio is honed in on large corporations that that are budgeting more money on IT and cloud services and would benefit most from its solutions. 

The world of cloud business solutions is big business that shows no sign of slowing yet. Earlier this year,  another cloud provider that also builds apps, Joyent, pulled in $85 million in funding -- showing that money to support these services is in no short supply.

With global IT integration blossoming into a $800 billion industry, and companies such as Appirio experiencing exponential growth in the last few years, venture firms are clamoring to get behind solutions that every big company is bringing on board.

In 2011 alone, Appirio increased year-over-year revenue by more than 80% and has expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Saaspoint and developed the Cloud Enablement Suite. 

The Appirio team has moved more than 1.5 million users to the public cloud to date and has offices in the U.S., Japan, Singapore and the U.K. with crowdsourced developers in 65+ countries.