UPDATED 12:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 15 2014

What you missed in Cloud: incumbents tapping startup resourcefulness for an edge

global worldwide tunnel cloudsIt’s been a good week to be a cloud startup, especially for Amplidata Inc., which landed $10 million in funding from one of the biggest names on the enterprise storage block to help bring enterprise data centers up to par with the ultra-agile environments of the world’s top service providers.

The six-year-old Amplidata offers a highly elastic object store called Himalaya designed to reliably accommodate the fast growing amounts of information pouring into the corporate network without the growth pains involved in scaling traditional data management systems. The new $10 million from Western Digital Corp.’s venture capital arm will be used to develop a new family of storage arrays that will combine Himalaya with hardware from HGST, Inc., a subsidiary of the hard drive kingpin focusing on the enterprise.

The cash infusion, which bumps the six-year-old Amplidata’s total funding past the $40 million mark, was announced on the same day that software-as-a-service titan Salesforce Inc. made its formal entry into the venture capital scene with the launch of a $100 million startup fund. The newly established investment arm will focus on financing early-stage firms developing solutions that complement the company’s Salesforce1 development platform, which was introduced last November as a way for customers and partners to deliver applications for emerging categories of connected devices.

The move is aimed at bringing focus to the company’s investment strategy, which has seen it back more than 100 startups over the years, including Box Inc., EverNote Inc. and other household names. The newly established Salesforce Ventures has taken four of Silicon Valley’s top risers under its wing, most notably DocuSign Inc., the electronic signature specialist.

While established ventures like Salesforce and Western Digital turn to the startup ecosystem for innovation, newer players such as CloudBees Inc. that don’t have as broad of a reach are trying to reinvent themselves without any outside help. The Masscused-based application delivery startup announced on Thursday that it’s following in the footsteps of Docker Inc. and abandoning its platform-as-a-service offering to focus exclusively a secondary project that has outgrown its original vision.

From now on, CloudBees will concentrate all of its resources on Jenkins, an open-source project designed to help developers work more efficiency that the company became actively involved in after recruiting creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi in 2011. The platform has become a hit in the DevOps community with more than 85,000 active installations around the world, momentum that CloudBees will work to capitalize with commercial solutions for deploying Jenkins in enterprise environments.

photo credit: Marty.FM via photopin cc

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