Joyent, a global provider of cloud computing software and services has announced it has completed an $85 million funding round, with European group Weather Investment II providing the majority of the round. Weather II was advised by Accelero Capital, an investment and management group. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies that clearly hold promise in the rapidly and profoundly changing telecom and enterprise markets worldwide.

Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom leader Telefónica, is also participating as a strategic investor. Cloud-based services are a key focus area for Telefónica's new Digital unit, and Joyent's technology expertise in this area will help Telefónica enhance its product offering.

Vitrue, has launched the industry's first award designed to recognize the best social media community managers. The "Vitrue Community Manager of the Year Award" will be given annually on "Community Manager Appreciation Day," beginning with the announcement of the inaugural 2012 winner on January 23, 2013. "Community Manager Appreciation Day" was created by Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang, who serves as one of the judges for the award.

WOMMA is partnering with Vitrue for the "Vitrue Community Manager of the Year Award" and will be featuring the finalists during the WOMMA Summit this November.

BigMachines, Inc., the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce, has announced the release of BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company's award-winning SaaS selling solution. BigMachines 12 enables sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, generate quotes, proposals and contracts, manage complex pricing, route approvals, and manage orders more efficiently and securely.

The new features delivered in BigMachines 12 are driven by customer input combined with extensive industry research. BigMachines gathers product feedback by collaborating with customers on the My BigIdea innovation portal, regional Customer Success Forums and Cloud conferences in the United States and Europe.

BigMachines customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12, including the following:

• The improved Migration Management Center allows customers to easily transfer changes between their BigMachines test and production sites. Customers can easily compare changes between two BigMachines instances, filter results, and select specific components to update. The new migration management center allows for greater visibility of changes and speeds up the migration process. 
• BigMachines' new Configuration Layout Editor allows customers to create complex configuration and search layouts with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for pixel perfect control of the page layout. The results are web pages are easier to design, faster to load, and allow for richer functionality. 
• BigMachines updated Commerce Rules Wizard now provides customers with a centralized location to create and edit all commerce rules. The new functionality adds more flexibility in the BigMachines commerce process and improves the user experience by providing a more scalable, standardized way to create hiding attributes, constraints and validations within BigMachines. 

Ilesfay, an early-stage company offering cloud-based data replication services for corporate product life-cycle management systems, announced its expansion into South America and the launch of a new product called ZoneSync.  ZoneSync allows network administrators to replicate data from their business systems to the cloud and create ongoing, automatic replication schedules that keep their data synchronized not only with their business systems but with their other cloud systems as well.  Ilesfay's expansion to South America was made possible after Amazon added its Sao Paulo region.

Xeround, providing elastic and highly available database software for public and private clouds, announced they secured $9 million in Series C funding.  The financing round was led by their current investors including Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.  Xeround is a database solution for MySQL-based apps that manages auto-scaling, high-availability, self-healing and multi-tenancy, while guaranteeing continuous service during schema changes, resource modifications and the scaling process.

Ariett, a purchase and expense management solution provider, launched today their Ariett AP Invoice solution on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform.  Now in the cloud, Ariett is able to provide an attractive subscription plan for AP Invoice.

Ariett AP Invoice is an AP Invoice Automation solution that streamlines AP business processes, accelerates approval workflows, and reduces paper with electronic document manager and Mobile Approval from any Smart Phone or device. 

ON24, Inc., a webcasting and virtual events provider, has launched their new Platform 10 called Virtual Events and Environments.  Platform 10 allows you to build virtual conferences, sales kickoff events, partner training centers, product resource centers, and the list goes on.  If you can think of a virtual meet-up, they've got you covered.  Bringing ON24 solutions onto one platform provides unmatched security, ease-of-use, extensibility and reliability.

Platform 10 is set up to allow ON24 and outside developers to create custom widgets for ON24 webcasts, allowing for more functionality and visualizations in their virtual environments.  Platform 10 has enterprise-class security, it is global and multilingual, and provides next generation reporting and analytics.

Backstop Solutions Group, a solution provider to the alternative asset management industry, announced the release of Backstop Portfolio Planning as an addition to their main portfolio management platform.  Backstop Portfolio Planning provides the tools to create and share customized portfolio scenarios based on target asset allocations from the main portfolio management platform.  This new release fulfills a need Backstop Solutions Group was hearing from their allocator clients.

Backstop Solutions Group provides solutions for hedge funds, funds of funds, endowments and other institutional investors.  It is a privately held company founded in 2003 with a global reach in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

AppDynamics has integrated its real-time application monitoring solution with SOASTA's CloutTest Platform.  The integration makes it easy to run full-scale performance tests of production systems using SOASTA with Java and .NET performance analytics collected through AppDynamics.

More companies today are adopting Apple products as mission critical enterprise devices for mobile work.  Using an iPad for a presentation, a MacBook for editing work, or an iPhone to check company email, the greater use of Apple devices has created new security issues for CIO's needing to secure each unique device.  With an already tight budget, many CIO's are looking to the cloud to reduce costs and simplify their IT infrastructure.

CenterBeam, specializing in hosted IT services, just announced a new service addressing the security of enterprise Apple products.  CenterBeams's Hosted Endpoint Management and Security service provides anti-virus and anti-spyware security software, centrally managed to ensure all a customer's devices remain protected against evolving security threats. The solution also includes patch management, software distribution, automated hard drive defragmentation, configuration management, asset tracking and optional data protection and web filtering.