Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-testing service Soasta helps companies set up tests for their app or web site to see if they can avoid crashes and failures caused by heavy traffic. The company has just patented the “cross-cloud grid provisioning” process that makes this testing possible.

The company uses more than 500,000 servers across the globe to simulate hundreds of thousands of users accessing a single app or website.

It’s ideal for extreme test-cases where people suddenly flood a website. For instance, prior to the London Olympic Games, Soasta helped staff prepare the official website for millions of people attempting to buy tickets.

Prior to the invention of cross-cloud grid provisioning technology, a lack of servers constrained this kind of performance testing. Setting up servers in the cloud would take hours. However, Soasta can tap into servers in 60 global locations running on 20 providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace. Setup takes place in a matter of minutes — even for the largest tests.

“This kind of cloud testing is now done daily by 400 of our corporate customers,” CEO Tom Lounibos told VentureBeat in an interview. When asked about whether the unique patent will make the company more attractive to potential acquirers, Lounibos said Soasta will likely go public.

Analysts agree that the availability of this kind of testing is an important step for the industry as a whole and boosts customer’s faith in the cloud. “Cloud computing depends on rapid deployment and on-demand access,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for technology research firm IDC in a statement. This technology can now provide “immediate access to those load servers across environments to help with the problems users face when trying to utilize different cloud platforms for testing.”

Soasta is often billed as Mercury Interactive for the cloud. Mercury is a testing services provider that HP bought for $4.5 billion. It was formed in 2008 and is currently used by 12 out of the 24 top online retailers. Its most high-profile customers include NASA, Microsoft, and Netflix.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Claranet, a London-based cloud hosting provider, has scooped up Star, a company that delivers managed technology services like unified communications, and advanced security services.

According to an official statement released on Star’s website, this acquisition has turned Claranet into the largest mid-tier provider of integrating hosting and networking services in Europe.

The local media views this as evidence of “cloud hosting consolidation;” Europe-based cloud companies like Claranet need to grow quickly, and bolster their range of services to compete with global cloud hosting giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

Related news: AWS recently announced that it would expand to its ninth region; it already has a strong footing in Europe with a data center in Ireland.

“This announcement confirms our ambition to become the clear European leader in the delivery of managed services,” said Claranet Group CEO, Charles Nasser. In a statement, Nasser termed this an “British entrepreneurial success story”, as both companies were founded in the UK.

The new business will incorporate an extended range of managed hosting and network services, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, and virtual data centers.

Claranet claims that this new and expanded company will have revenues of over $150 million, about 700 staff, and over 4,500 customers, and operations will be expanded to the UK France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

In addition, new customers gained through the acquisition include Airbus, Amnesty International, Care UK, Channel 5, Veolia, Signet, CSH, IRIS, De Vere Hotels and Richmond Events.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-based services may be a darn sight cheaper than on-premise alternatives, but over time, costs can escalate.

Cloudability, the startup with a service to monitor the costs of your company’s cloud-based infrastructure, has launched its analytics tool. This enables anyone within the organization to continuously improve the way they are using cloud tools, and ensure that spending for these services does not go unmonitored.

Startups with lean budgets can sign up for free and Cloudability will pull up invoice and billing data (not estimated data, as is the industry norm) from cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

Cloudability Founder and CEO, Mat Ellis

The product has been in beta for over a year and is used by 4,000 customers, ranging from tiny startups to larger businesses. Cloudability offers a free service, but enterprises will need to fork over in excess of $50 per month to manage multiple cloud accounts. It has come as a surprise to the founders that the enterprise service is growing fastest; corporate finances desperately need to be kept in check.

The Portland-based startup was founded by Mat Ellis, a British entrepreneur. He said he formed the idea for the company when working as an IT consultant to pay the bills.  ”Everybody asked the same question: what am I spending?”

On a phone call with VentureBeat, he said he didn’t initially think of Cloudability as a business; it was initially conceived of as a “favor to clients.” After graduating from TechStars, the mentorship-driven accelerator, Ellis focused on building out the product.

With greater access to the data, companies can track costs and foster a culture of continuous IT improvement. The analytics piece lets customers drill down into the metrics and visualize the data to present to their managers. As a team, they can review cost, network usage, and CPU utilization to find out which specific instances are ringing up the most charges.

The company recently raised its $8.7 million Series A from Foundry Group, 500 Startups and Data Collective, among others.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With scattered reports of customer defections in the wake of major outages, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced today that it has expanded to the Asia Pacific region after opening a new data center in Australia.

AWS is a collection of web services that Amazon offers; the most well-known include Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. It’s the largest cloud computing provider in the world, but it faces heat from Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and newcomers like Joyent.

For AWS, Australia and New Zealand are ripe for market domination: 10,000 local businesses already use AWS, including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. No doubt, a local data center should help improve the responsiveness of cloud-based applications and could enable AWS to grow its customer-base.

AWS also revealed that it will be working with a number of partners as it moves into the region, including RightScale, a cloud management technology, and Acquia, which provides hosted Drupal to over 2,000 customers.

“With the capability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end-users in Sydney [and] store data locally in Australia. We expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS,” Andy Jassy, AWS’s senior vice president, said in a statement.

The new Sydney region supports myriad AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon CloudWatch. Access the full list here. 

At a time when its primary competitors are picking up steam, Amazon is focused on international expansion. Asia Pacific is its ninth region since it launched in 2002; the company already has a strong presence in three regions in the U.S, as well as Tokyo, Sao Paolo and Ireland. Only the Middle East and Africa lack a strong AWS presence.

This summer, high-profile AWS customers were affected by several major blackouts that was caused by a latent bug. Netflix, Foursquare, Reddit and others were down.

Image via Shutterstock

Secure cloud hosting company FireHost raised $10 million in its third round of financing.

FireHost offers enterprise level solutions for large companies that need to protect their data. It uses virtualization technology, multiple layers of hacker protection, and compliance expertise to create a safe, high-performing, and scalable hosting platform.

The company has blocked more than 250 million hack attempts to date.

It primarily focuses on websites with high traffic needs and clients include large organizations across multiple industries, like eCommerce, SaaS and healthcare. Clients include HomeAway, Duke University, Fossil, ArcSight by HP, Farmers Insurance, and the Clinton Foundation. Startups and small businesses can use the platform as well.

FireHost has almost doubled in size from year to year, and this funding will go towards developing the infrastructure, expanding the product line, and entering new global markets.

Last year, FireHost took $10 million in a Series B investment to infiltrate Europe and open additional data center facilities. This most recent investment came entirely from previous investors The Stephens Group, LLC, and angel investors that have stuck with FireHost from its beginning in 2009.

FireHost is based in Dallas, Texas, with offices in Phoenix, London, and Amsterdam.

Internap provides “intelligent IT Infrastructure solutions” for enterprises and uses a variety of solutions to lower IT costs, including Colocation, Enterprise IP and Hybrid Hosting. With Voxel’s inexpensive VoxCLOUD cloud hosting services and data centers all around the world, Internap is picking up extra resources to stake its future on the cloud.

“As IT Infrastructure outsourcing advances, enterprises increasingly seek service providers to support myriad applications and workloads throughout their entire IT lifecycle,” said Eric Cooney, president and CEO of Internap, in a statement. “This acquisition of Voxel increases Internap’s market share and growth rate, accelerates our product roadmap and creates an unmatched competitive position as an IT Infrastructure services provider.”

The deal between Internap and Voxel closed on Dec. 30, with an all-cash transaction of about $30 million. Internap has also offered up an “additional potential $5 million in cash tied to the delivery of specific objectives during the next two years.” Translation: if Voxel makes a boatload of cash in the short-term, key investors are getting a nice extra payday.

New York City-based Voxel was founded in 1999 and serves more than 1,000 customers. Voxel’s presence in North America, Europe and Asia will help Atlanta-based Internap with global penetration. Voxel was backed with a $5.5 million round by New York-based Seaport Capital.

Internap’s share price on the Nasdaq exchange is almost unchanged on the news and sits at $5.95 per share.