TopSchool Inc., a Denver-based provider of student lifecycle management SaaS for higher education, has raised $8 million in Series C funding, according to a regulatory filing.

Karen Buckner, a partner with MK Capital, is listed as a new board member. Past backers include Alsop Louie Partners and New World Ventures. www.topschoolinc.com

It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.

The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. In order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But Accel partner Richard Wong is in no rush. He thinks an IPO is likely once the company passes $100 million in revenue. And if revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away.

Atlassian makes product development software (for making software) that is used by 20,000 customers around the world, including Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe. “In our belief,” says Wong, “these guys are the standard in product development software—20,000 customers can’t be wrong.” Its products include the Jira bug tracker, Confluence wiki and collaboration suite, and a host of software project development tools.

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

The suite's features include: multi-site planning and management, material requirements planning (MRP), production management, engineering change control (ECC), shop floor control and work-in-progress (WIP) management.

Service-now.com, the developer of modern IT service management SaaS, today announced the Service-now.com Spring 2010 release includes a new SaaS application for IT cost management.

Service-now.com IT Cost Management helps IT organizations understand IT service costs and communicate and measure the value of services to the business in financial terms.

"More than ever IT organizations are required to demonstrate business value through fiscally accountable IT services," said Matt French, Service-now.com director of marketing. "IT has traditionally struggled to demonstrate the value of its services and is viewed as a cost center simply because IT cost is disconnected from service value. IT organizations can now use Service-now.com to communicate IT service value in terms the business can understand." Service-now.com is the first to deliver a SaaS IT cost application built on an IT service automation platform. Service-now.com IT Cost Management is natively integrated with Service-now.com applications for service portfolio management, project and portfolio management, and workflow. Service-now.com uses its CMDB service model for cost allocation to speed customer time to production, improve data accuracy, and eliminate technology overhead.

IT service organizations can use Service-now.com IT Cost Management to allocate, categorize and track actual IT costs, and to compare budgets against actual costs. It is unique in providing: -- An IT financial management dashboard for business and IT decision makers -- Automated IT service cost aggregation based on CMDB service modeling, work time and tasks -- Accurate and relevant service portfolio pricing based on value -- Allocation of IT costs to business units, cost centers or any organizational unit -- CMDB CI rate cards for easy input of common, redundant costs Service-now.com delivers a constant stream of new, organically developed functionality and applications to customers as part of their existing subscription license. The IT cost management application is one of six new applications included in the Service-now.com Spring 2010 release.

Nimble, customer-driven development has established Service-now.com as the innovator of modern ITSM technology for IT organizations working in a refocused, more demanding business environment. The Service-now.com Spring 2010 release is the most substantial release in the five-year history of modern SaaS for ITSM. The release is focused on helping IT organizations better define, manage and demonstrate the value of IT service to the business.

A demonstration video of the Service-now.com Spring 2010 release, including the new IT cost management application, is now available.

Alternatively, a live instance of the Service-now.com application is always available at http://demo.service-now.com (no registration required).

Licensing and availability Service-now.com has delivered three major releases per year for the last five years to provide customers with the latest in ITSM technology. Delivered to customers on June 4, 2010, the new Spring 2010 release applications and functionality are included in the Service-now.com subscription license at no additional cost. Service-now.com offers a simple yet flexible subscription license with volume discounts available.

Oco, Inc., the leading innovator of Software-as-a-Service business intelligence solutions, has announced that D&M Holdings Inc, a global manufacturer of premium and super-premium audio and video products, has successfully deployed Oco’s SaaS BI solution for advanced reporting and analytics.

"The ease of use and breadth of visibility that the solution offers has excited the user base in our organization,” said Lalit Panda, CIO of D&M Holdings. “Taking a SaaS BI approach enabled us to get the solution up and running for users across three continents quickly; we were able to see the business benefits right away.”

Major customers across multiple verticals select BMC in deals involving virtualization and cloud management

Single, unified IT management a "must have" for companies seeking benefits of physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT

BMC Software has announced that it has passed the $100 million mark in highly strategic "cloud foundation" deals where virtualization and computing management capabilities were the key element in the customer's final selection.

Pay-per-use software licensing has been on the minds of a lot of people these days, including industry analysts. The thinking on how a pay-per-use model works with traditional software is that as users leverage the software, the usage information is gathered on the customer premise, and sent back to the ISV frequently. The ISV then analyzes the usage information, and pricing is applied. In addition, there is a wealth of analytics that can be gathered by the ISV.

A few times, our blogs have touched on why pure-play pay-per-use license models will not appeal to traditional software vendors (cost of the infrastructure implementation and unp redictability of payment), and how some software vendors have remediated these issues with alternative models that balance the flexibility of use of the pay-per-use model with the predictability of more standard license models. Some of these hybrid models are known as remix, subscription with rental option, or token models.

However, the wider adoption of SaaS models may lead to the adoption of more pay-per-use models. When I hear people describe how they would like a pay-per-use model to work, the explanations include: "just like a cell phone plan based on minutes of use" or "just like a water or electricity model". A major reason why a pay-per-use model works for utility companies is that the utility company controls the provisioning of the service That is, the service being provided actually flows through the utility provider where its usage can be monitored. It's an artifact of the way the service is provided (although some may argue that the use of meter readers offsets this argument a bit).

Prior to Demandforce, Barry spent 5 years at Yahoo on its Connected TV product, which brings Web widgets from Yahoo to your TV with the aim of connecting consumers to the Web and the information that matters to them most. Before Yahoo, Barry was a venture investor in the areas of networking, consumer electronics and web services. Prior to that, he worked with start-up technology companies, both as an operating executive and as a practicing corporate and securities lawyer.

Backed by Mike Maples, Demandforce’s SaaS application automates internet marketing and communications, so customers can focus on running their day-to-day operations. The startup, which is profitable, has thousands of customers across service verticals that include dental care, automotive repair, spas, salons, chiropractors, and others.

SOURCE: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/05/06/former-yahoo-connected-tv-chief-joins-software-startup-demandforce/

Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps reseller that also helps enterprises migrate to and manage the productivity suite, has raised $1 million in funding from Hallett Capital and other investors. The startup has also brought on a new CEO, Jon Hallet (who was the lead investor in the round) to lead the company. Cloud Sherpas’ founder, Michael Cohn, will become Vice President of Marketing and Product Management.

Cloud Sherpas not only helps companies migrate and transition over to Google Apps but also provides additional tools to make the productivity suite more useful. Currently, over 1,800 organizations use Cloud Sherpas’ products and services.

Innovative SaaS IT Management Empowers Emerging Enterprises and Service Providers to Quickly and Easily Implement Unified Monitoring from the Datacenter to the Cloud

Nimsoft, a business unit of CA, Inc., today announced availability of Nimsoft On Demand, a Software as a Service (SaaS) Unified Monitoring™ solution that delivers the robust capabilities and benefits of IT monitoring as an on-demand solution. With Nimsoft On Demand, emerging enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can maintain visibility into their business-critical IT infrastructure—including both their internal assets and those in the cloud—without having to purchase, administer or deploy monitoring hardware and software on their own premises.

Nimsoft On Demand is built on the proven technology of the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS), which provides broad, scalable, extensible, rapidly deployable and easy-to-use IT monitoring in a single product. It enables customers to implement NMS Unified Monitoring capabilities under an adaptable subscription model, allowing them to pay only for the level of monitoring they use at any given time.