Pertino nabs $8.85M venture funding round

Cloud networking startup Pertino Networks announced this week that it has finalized a Series A round of funding in cooperation with Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

EARLIER: Former Packeteer head has new networking startup

Pertino -- which is short for "Cupertino," where the company is headquartered -- says that it offers a software-based approach to the network issues that can affect businesses moving into the cloud. The firm asserts that this is a "radical" simplification of the challenge facing cloud adopters.

CEO Craig Elliot, former head of Packeteer and an alumnus of Apple, says in the announcement: "The cloud and 'as-a-service' delivery models have transformed the IT landscape from a computing, storage and application perspective while, at the same time, the network paradigm has changed little. As a result, networks that once enabled businesses now constrain them when it comes to harnessing the disruptive capabilities and economies of the cloud."

The company raised $8.85 million from the first-round investors, a group that included another Apple alum, ex-CFO Joe Graziano. Until recently, Pertino had been operating in stealth mode, and there are still few details available about its core technology, although Norwest general partner Matt Howard says "virtualization and social networking concepts" enter into it.

Networking issues are certainly a major part of getting the cloud to work, since heavily virtualized systems -- which tend to go hand in hand with cloud computing -- generally impose significantly higher loads on a company's network. This means that optimization techniques could be increasingly valuable as cloud adoption grows and traffic levels continue to climb.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

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