Cloud management startup RightScale raises another $13M

It looks like the economic downturn hasn’t eliminated investment for cloud computing. RightScale, a Santa Barbara, Calif. company that manages applications in the Internet cloud, has raised $13 million in a second round of funding.

There are other app management companies out there, such as WeoCeo and Intridea, but chief executive Michael Crandell has said RightScale stands out with its visual interface and the monitoring it provides with its own servers. Initially, RightScale (like most of the competition), focused on managing applications running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, but in the last few months it has announced support for apps in GoGrid, FlexiScale and RackSpace too.

Crandell didn’t share many specifics, but says RightScale has been growing every month, and he doesn’t see that slowing anytime soon. In this economic climate, more companies are looking for an easy and affordable way to run their applications in the cloud, rather than on their own servers.

“We’re seeing increasing interest among large companies, who say, ‘If we can avoid buying another Blade server, I want to,'” Crandell says

He adds that RightScale isn’t running out of cash (good to know, since it raised $4.5 million back in April) and just took the investment to fuel growth. Plus, raising money could be even harder next year. It also helped that lead backer Index Ventures is based in Europe, where RightScale gets one-fourth of its customers, so this could provide a good launch pad for international expansion.

RightScale’s first round investor, Benchmark Capital, participated in the new round. New Relic, a Benchmark startup that manages applications built in the Ruby on Rails programming framework, also announced a second round last month.