The round was led by T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and other public market investors, with participation by its previous venture capital investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. The round brings the company’s total financing to $245 million, and follows its Series B of $40 million last year.

“In our view, Pure represents a rare combination of disruptive innovation, strong leadership, and strong growth. In particular, customer references were excellent,” said Henry Ellenbogen of T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. “We look forward to working with Pure as they scale and strive toward becoming a public company.”

Pure Storage produces Flash Array, a solid state storage solution that lowers the price of flash storage to about $5 per gigabyte. The company essentially makes solid state storage at a price comparable to traditional storage, but at 10x its speed, space and power efficiency.

The money will be used to bolster R&D efforts as well as expand internationally. It also helps prepare the company for an IPO, the company indicated in a press release. Over the last 10 months, the company has extended into 10 new countries, including  the U.K., Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Australia, and Singapore.

Along with the funding, the company also announced adding former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman to its board.

“Pure Storage is experiencing much of what we did at Data Domain,” said Slootman. “They’re replacing one storage media (disk) with another (flash). They pioneered the use of inline data reduction to remove the cost hurdle for the media upgrade, and, as a result of being the first to get this right they are growing about as fast as companies can grow organically. I am glad to be able to offer my own perspective in driving and managing growth to the top tier board of directors and leadership team at Pure.”

Pure Storage competes against legacy storage solutions EMC Corp and NetApp, which offers flash storage solutions at a much higher rate of $20 to $50 per gigabyte. It also competes against startups such as Nimble Storage and Skyera. Earlier this month, Skyera released its latest generation (link to “Skyera’s Latest Gen Boosts Data Capacity by 10X for ½ the Price” shared on Google Docs but not published) that offers flash for $1.99 per gigabyte, or 49 cents after data deduplication techniques are applied.

According to the announcement, the $45 million Security-as-a-Service company already partners with more than half of the largest providers that host or deploy cloud services. With threats to data’s welfare on the rise, the market for services that keep it safe grows. Alert Logic’s partnership with Welsh Carson allows for further tech investment and enables an international future for the company.

“Businesses are becoming more and more dependant all the time on strategic applications and data that resides in data centers,” says Alert Logic CEO Gray Hall. “As people move [applications and data] to the cloud they need different types of security solutions to protect their infrastructure in the cloud, and that’s our business.”

While the company’s anchored by its American roots for now, Welsh Carson’s resources give Alert Logic’s the potential to expand their reach. That means more products in more markets. “Three to five years from now we would expect to cover all major markets around the globe, and have a significantly expanded security product suite,” Hall says. “We’ve always invested heavily in our technology and are actively doing that today, but with Welsh Carson’s backing we have greater resources to invest faster, and not only making our products and technology scale more effectively, but also broadening the coverage of the cloud security services.”

The board decided last year Alert Logic would seek recapitalization opportunities in 2013, and give investors the chance to realize their investments or stick around long-term. Morgan Stanley led the company through the process and into an enviable position. ‘It wound up being a competitive scenario [to partner with Alert Logic] where several of the top private equity firms in the world submitted bids and Welsh Carson came out on top.”

The partners now share a vision for the future and agree on ways to realize it. “The management team and Welsh Carson see eye to eye on the size of the opportunity, the long-term duration of the opportunity, the company strategy and we think that this market segment that we’re pursuing is multiple billions in fact we’ve estimated the market at more than $5 billion,” Hall says. “And today as a [$45 million] company we believe we’ve only scratched the surface of that opportunity.”

Partnership with Welsh Carson provides capital and cushion as Alert Logic weighs options for its financial future.

“Management and Welsh Carson have a common mind and a common strategy that we’ve bought into that we think will be successful over the next few years,” Hall says. “What this means for the company three to five years from now could range from an IPO, to simply maintaining our independence as a private company; and the fact that Welsh Carson is starting now gives us the flexibility to keep our options open there.”

Now the company has raised a Series C $22 million round led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital, with participation from FSN PME and all existing investors, including Idinvest Partners, OMNES Capital and Galileo Partners. The new funding will fuel global marketing efforts as well to spur research and development.

Scality’s RING Organic Solution provides petabyte-scale storage that distributes data across multiple references to eliminate the risk of failure or the need to go offline. One of the company’s first customers, Telenet, signed in July of 2010, has multiplied its data center capacity more than 10 times yet has had to shut down a data center in order to update its systems. “Every hard drive will fail at some point, but we move the data around based on drive functionality so we create a system that is extremely autonomous,” Jerome Lecat, CEO of Scality, told Red Herring.

Selling technology since 2010, the company four of the top 10 cable operators in the U.S. and leading telecom companies in France, Italy, Germany, and the UK as clients. Adoption is steamrolling at 500 percent year over year growth.

“Our investors are a perfect match for the DNA of the company:  They share our vision for the future of data storage and they understand the global market place,”  Lecat said in a statement.  “I have managed several start-ups, but this is the first time I have seen a 5x sales growth on an annual basis.  A disruption is happening in the market and we are driving it.  This is very exciting.  We are going to continue growing and are recruiting to sustain this growth including increasing our investment in R&D.”

Facing a $100 billion storage market, Scality meets a price point unequaled in the industry with an attractive scalable model.

This latest round brings Scality’s total funding to $35 million. It has offices in San Francisco, Paris, New York, Washington DC, and Tokyo.

“The growth opportunity in the software storage market is very exciting for us,” said Doug Carlisle, managing director, Menlo Ventures.  “The intersection of Mobile, Social, Big Data and Cloud Infrastructure is creating a disruption in technology innovation.  Scality is leading the disruption in software defined storage technology.  Since its introduction in 2010, Scality’s RING software storage product has seen rapid adoption by companies eager to try a new storage approach.  We look forward to watching Scality continue to innovate in data storage solutions for the web scale infrastructure markets.”

Scality was a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 North America winner in 2012.

As NTP Software’s CEO Bruce Backa is fond of saying: “The business of file data management may not be as sexy as Google or Facebook, but like death and taxes you can’t get away from it.”

Luckily now you don’t have to. Thanks to NTP’s Universal File Access, a product the company debuted this week, file data management can be done from the beach, the golf course, the car pool in rush hour traffic.

It works as simple as Dropbox’s “synch and share model,” uploading digital content from any device with a few simple commands, but is far from ubiquitous. The company provides an end-to-end solution that enables corporate users the ability to interact safely and securely with the organization’s file data from any device on an Internet or mobile connection.

Content is immediately compressed, encrypted, and sent to the data center, where corporate policies are automatically enforced by software. NTP Software claims to be the only vendor with extensions in the OS and file systems of Windows, NetApp, EMC and HNAS. Policy enforcement is the company’s special sauce. Cloud agnostic, UFA uses the cloud only to transport, not to store the sensitive data. The tool enables 1000 mobile devices to connect to the database with a secure connection.

“Our goal isn’t to synch with every machine and share it with your closest friends,” Backa said. “Our goal to recognize these are valuable digital assets, governed by security. In addition to encrypting them, we ensure existing data center policies continue to be enforced. Objects used in our application receive the same security they’d get from a desktop.”

It’s an ideal tool for insurance adjusters on the road downloading sensitive accident photos that could be used in a court case, or child welfare agents on assignment sharing sensitive client data within the agency.

Founded in 1993, the 20 year old company has a rich history in file data management. It started working with Microsoft to help consolidate file data management on Windows. In the early days of the Windows NT platform, Microsoft competed against NetWare, which had intrinsic quota reporting functions Microsoft lacked. NTP provided Windows a higher level of file data management, and overtime, adapted their software to perform similar functions for the platforms of NetApp, EMC and HNAS.

That kind of legacy has earned the company an impressive list of clients that include 82 of the Fortune 100 and 76 of the Global 100. Its markets include government and education, finance and insurance, technology and media, healthcare and life sciences, energy and retail. Honda, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, and Starbucks use NTP’s products. Every day, over 20 million users are using the company’s software.

Its traditional products include NTP Software QFS, an integrated policy engine; NTP Software File Reporter, a file analytics tool; and NTP Software File Auditor, an audit and compliance tool. Each is deeply integrated with the OS and file systems of Windows, NetApp, EMC and HNAS.

Its latest product UFA features a Cloud Connector, which maintains a connection between internal storage hosts and the BYOD Manager.  It integrates with Windows Active Directory and provides control over limits on size, quantity and type of file data. Connecting end user devices, its BYOD Manager  provides flexible caching options, proxies Active Directory security and aggregates communications. Its BYOD Suite provides end users with the ability to immediately upload and delete file data, and allows for lost or stolen devices to be shut down and wiped of business-critical information.

The new product puts NTP’s technology closer to the user, which essentially opens up its market to the smaller business community and completely changes the game, Backa explained.

“Up to now, we just managed storage, and end users don’t really know we exist,” Backa said. “With this latest tool moves us much closer to the end user, the person who really drives benefits from the technology. Overtime, this will allow us to reach smaller and smaller players. Previously, you had to be in at least the top half of all organizations to have enough storage, people and money to get real value. With this, even a one person company could get value.”

To Backa’s knowledge, its new product offers a singular technology that begins a new space competitors have yet to enter. NTP’s data center heritage and legacy technology put it at a unique advantage. Backa estimates the company is ahead of the competition by several years.

“Nine women can’t make a baby in a month,” Backa said. “If a company plunks $100 million on the table, they can’t write technology faster. This technology takes years to develop.”

Oracle has made some strong boasts about its cloud ambitions, but has yet to produce any real muscle. This acquisition gives Oracle new team members with real insight into what’s happening behind the scenes at OpenStack, as well as a unique tool that can plug into a data center and make any platform ubiquitous, a key advantage for an enterprise company selling a variety of technologies to a diversity of infrastructures.

When Amazon goes down, so does everyone else. Outages last October and June caused the disruption of Flipboard, Foursquare, Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and others.

So why put all your cloud data in one basket?

With the release of version 3.0 of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED), you no longer have to. TransLattice now provides the world’s first geographically distributed Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) to deploy on multiple public cloud provider networks at the same time, as well as on virtual machines (VMs), physical hardware or any combination thereof. No longer do you have to trust your database to a single cloud, but can instead have it span several clouds, distributed around the world, which makes surviving the next mega hurricane practically a breeze.

“TransLattice provides the world’s first and only cross-cloud database, and we control the data within all availability zones in those clouds,” TransLattice’s CEO Frank Huerta told Red Herring. “We can be in Amazon East, but not West, or not in Amazon Europe, or only in Amazon Europe. What’s unique about what we do now is we can tie multiple clouds together for redundancy, to avoid vendor lock in.”

The company’s latest version of TED also features upgraded monitoring capabilities to become a stronger, more robust product, Huerta said. Along with the release of the new version of TED, the company also announced a new partnership with Amazon to use its infrastructure.

TransLattice effectively geographically distributes the data through multiple clouds, but keeps it all under one unique database. Companies no longer need to federate systems or run isolated databases, which can be very costly and cumbersome.

“We can handle transactions from all over the globe, in and out of cloud, and globally resolve those, all in the right order, through one unique data base,” Huerta explained.

Most centralized databases in a geographically distributed world rely on a single backup source, which can be difficult to scale geographically and compliance is often an issue, as certain data can’t be sent to China, while data in German data centers can’t leave the country, for example. And the backup is often not reliable due to increasing complexity. TransLattice can provide multiple backup from multiple locations and can control the data, so that German data remains in Germany or guarantying sensitive data is never stored in China. “Nobody else can do that,” Huerta said.

Plus, TransLattice can distribute data locally so “the speed of light works in your favor,” Huerta said. The company can instantly move data closer to where it is being requested. If a travelling Palo Alto executive requests data in New York or Europe, for example, that data will be instantly transferred to data centers local to her location to ensure the greatest speed.

“We provide redundancy, but through one global database, not isolated databases as the industry operates today,” Huerta said.

TransLattice provides such elastic infrastructure at a fraction of the industry standard. Based on the company’s own internal estimates, it can save customers 50 to 70 percent of the cost of deploying a database. “We price by the node, not users, and our system is very easy to scale,” Huerta said.

“When you need more memory or storage, you can just add nodes as you need like Lego bricks.”
Further savings come from a simpler approach.

“We really started from scratch with the architecture, so it’s much simpler, more elegant and fundamentally much better,” said Louise Funke, VP of Marketing for TransLattice. “There are no expensive SANs to replicate data or synchronize data. Customers can combine it with existing infrastructure or existing clouds in other regions. It makes it very easy for enterprises to dip their toe in the water. We help accelerate moving to the cloud.”

TransLattice’s technology provides the financial services industry multi-site redundancy delivered with 24×7 availability with no single point of failure, as well as global visibility of data. Content development and mobile infrastructure entities can distribute data at the point closest to users to minimize latency. Military intelligence agencies can distribute computing infrastructure closer to the front, without individual node failure affecting availability. Cloud providers are guaranteed their cloud database will keep running even if major infrastructure goes down.

Naturally, there will be competition, and Huerta admits that he maintains a healthy sense of paranoia. Nevertheless, most competing vendors are deeply wedded to older models, which will make the transition difficult, according to Huerta. “We have important IP that won’t be easy to replicate,” Huerta said.

This technology is the future, one in which TransLattice hopes to lead, Huerta maintained.
“In the next three to five years, 30 to 40 percent of networks will run this way with distributed architecture,” Huerta predicted. “It’s an emerging trend that will keep growing. We’re not going to unseat every database today, but this type of technology is going to have a big seat at the table, and hopefully TransLattice will be at the forefront.”

The company will use the new funding for “fueling our product development, accelerating marketing and sales, and growing our partner and education programs in the U.S. and internationally,” explained Clate Mask, the CEO and Co-Founder of Infusionsoft in the company’s blog. “This ultimately means we will reach more small businesses around the globe and enable them to succeed with our all-in-one sales and marketing software, services and education.”

The company provides a customizable, end to end platform that integrates CRM, email, and social marketing, and sales tools. It offers a solution along the lines of Salesforce, Hubspot, or Marketo, but specifically specializes in businesses of two to 25 employees that earn more than $100,000 in annual sales.

“Goldman Sachs shares our belief that successful small businesses are the engine behind the economy. But, the sad truth is that running a small business is hard,” Mask stated in the blog. “More often than not small business success comes at a price. Entrepreneurs end up giving up their lives to make the business work. We aren’t okay with this—we think you should be able to run a successful business and still have a life. We empower entrepreneurs. And we believe in people and their dreams. That’s what we do.”

The company’s clients include Internet startups, veterianarians, wedding planners, and exercise gyms. It serves over 12,000 customers with 50 percent growth over the past year.

This latest round brings the company’s total financing to $71 million, including a $9 million round Mohr Davidow Ventures in 2007, plus an $8 million from vSpring Capital in 2008, with Mohr Davidow participating.

Based in Chandler, Ari., the company has 350 employees.

“We believe Infusionsoft is the market leader in delivering an all-in-one sales and marketing software solution for true small businesses,” says Raheel Zia, managing director for Goldman Sachs Group. “Infusionsoft is a proven partner in working with small businesses and Goldman Sachs is pleased to be an investor in this highly innovative and unique company in the software as a service industry.”

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm of the Central Intelligence Agency, made a strategic investment backed by a technology development agreement in cloud mobile security provider Tyfone for its “proven capabilities” in secure ID and NFC. An independent nonprofit, the firm’s primary purpose is to identify “innovative technology solutions to support the U.S. Government,” according to the press release.

The size of the investment is undisclosed.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Tyfone specializes in mobile financial transaction security and identity solutions. In a world going to the cloud, the company’s technology enables distributed authentication and cloud security on any network. The company produces a mobile banking platform, a mobile wallet, contactless NFC, marketing tools, and hardware products. Founded in 2004, the company serves several US credit unions as customers. It has over 300 issued invention claims along with 50 issued and pending patents in the U.S., Taiwan and Patent Cooperating Treaty countries.

“Tyfone has an impressive patent portfolio and history of innovation in mobile financial, secure ID management, and NFC solutions,” said Jay Emmanuel, Technology VP at IQT. “We believe that Tyfone’s technology has the potential to address a wide range of complex government and commercial secure identity challenges.”

Though there’s no guaranty the US government will pick up Tyfone’s technology, it’s likely expecting something for its money. Cyber terror has been identified by the US government as a crucial terror threat, so it makes sense that the government is putting its money behind its press releases.

“A key benefit of our strategic partnership with IQT is the ability to take our innovative mobile security and NFC platform to the U.S. government,” said Siva Narendra, CEO and co-founder of Tyfone. “Our platform includes high volume manufactured hardware that brings smartcard security and NFC to virtually any mobile phone, tablet or PC. In addition, our mobile platform’s software has processed over 7 million secure financial transactions, and we look forward to extending it to IQT’s government customers.”

Unveiled last month, cloud storage provider TwinStrata’s CloudArray 4.0 takes the world of cloud storage up a notch, enabling both Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) protocols so that both data blocks and files can be uploaded for a fully empowered cloud. “Essentially, any application can work seamlessly in the cloud,” explained Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata. “Anything that can be done with on-premise storage can now easily be done in the cloud without a local storage footprint.”

The company has prided itself on making “cloud storage look and feel like local storage,” Vekiarides explained, but until now had only accommodated storage for block data and not the actual programs that powered a business. Its newly released product is the first cloud-integrated storage product to natively support NAS and SAN storage.

By putting all storage needs in the cloud, TwinStrata is able to provide continuous data access, which is where the product truly becomes “revolutionary,” Vekiarides explained. It is a tremendous advantage for backup and archiving. On a data center floor, enterprises continually struggle to upgrade and backup their storage. Twinstrata provides a data storage appliance with a very small footprint up to 2U that stores up to 50 petabytes of data, enough to fill a large room of disk drives. Plus, the capacity can serve as disaster recovery with the cloud functioning as the remote site, saving hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in expenses. Enterprises pay only for what they need, spending essentially nothing on disaster recovery if no disaster occurs.

“Our appliance has virtually unlimited capacity that never needs to be replaced,” Vekiarides said. “It makes life easier for IT administrators, not to mention saving millions of dollars when it comes to disaster recovery.”

The new product also features new management functions that deliver better visibility against historic and present operations. A new dashboard provides easier visual access, monitoring and reporting on data stored in the cloud.

The company’s cloud solution is now supported by more than 20 cloud storage providers, with the addition of Dell, Google, HP Cloud Services, IBM SmartCloud, SoftLayer and others this year.

“CloudArray 4.0 provides a viable alternative to replacing enterprise class or mid range storage,” Vekiarides said. “You can upload any data and push it into the cloud without changing any applications. That’s the key. Whether you buy storage in a file or in a block storage array, you now have an option that can sit alongside it and significantly reduce the maintenance expense of doing it yourself.”