RightScale grabs another $25M for web-based cloud management

Cloud management software provider RightScale has raised another $25 million in its third round of funding.

Cloud storage and computing has become increasingly popular because it provides businesses with a low-impact, pay-as-you-go model that offers a lot of computing power and storage without high maintenance and installation costs. This third round of funding is just another example of how much interest there is in cloud processing, said RightScale chief executive Michael Crandell.

“The funding is a validation of very high expectations — both of the cloud and of RightScale,” Crandell said. “Part of RightScale’s specific appeal is our launch around the time of Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud), so everything we’ve done has been organized around the new cloud architectures that are popular today.”

RightScale takes a “software-as-a-service” approach to cloud management with a browser-based interface that incorporates third-party applications like Alfresco to help businesses manage their cloud networks without having to physically interact with servers. The software runs on top of cloud infrastructure providers like Rackspace and Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud servers.

The most recent round was led by Tenaya Capital, though existing investors Benchmark Capital, Presidio Ventures and Index Ventures and new investor DAG Ventures took part.

The funding will be directed to marketing as well as research and development for the RightScale cloud management platform. RightScale also plans to expand the number of applications built by external developers.

RightScale has a pretty wide array of customers, including Zynga and Playfish — two of the top social game companies on Facebook that run games like FarmVille, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, FishVille, Pet Society, PetVille and Restaurant City. Founded in 2006, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company has launched more than 1.5 million on the RightScale platform.

RightScale raised about $22 million in its previous two rounds of funding and other investments.