Introducing CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s cloud-focused channel

The CloudBeat category has been sitting atop VentureBeat’s homepage for a few months, but today we’re officially launching the channel with web app performance manager New Relic as our channel sponsor.

Over the last few years, an incredible amount of major technology companies and startups have innovated and invested in the cloud space. We’ve been following the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce.com for much longer than the CloudBeat channel has been live, but now that we have a dedicated channel, we’ll be ramping up coverage of these fast-moving companies that are using the power of web technologies to make business cheaper and more efficient.

Our foremost goal is to fervently cover the development of the three main layers of the cloud: 1) Web applications, or SaaS, 2) Middleware, or PaaS and 3) Back-end infrastructure, or IaaS. On top of this, we want to find other companies and startups that are innovating and creating other “soft” layers, including security, analytics and cost. If you’re a cloud company or represent a cloud company that is innovating, we want to hear from you. When big news is happening, e-mail us at tips@venturebeat.com to keep us in the loop. We want to know what you’re doing.

The CloudBeat channel will not only allow us to focus more on cloud coverage, but also help us build ties to our upcoming CloudBeat 2011 conference. The event will be held on Nov 30 to Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA and we’ll be using a customer-centric approach to explore cases of revolutionary enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers at CloudBeat include Box.net CEO Aaron Levie, Rackspace President of Cloud Services Lew Moorman, Salesforce VP and Heroku GM Byron Sebastian, and many more.

You can register here.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank channel sponsor New Relic, an all-in-one web application performance management provider that supports Ruby, Java, PHP, .Net & Python. New Relic’s cloud-based service combines real user, server and application monitoring in a single SaaS solution built from the ground up, providing a comprehensive top-to-bottom, front-to-back view of application performance. More than 13,000 organizations use New Relic to monitor over 25 billion metrics in production each day.

New Relic continues to grow and refine its service and today it has added free server monitoring to its core SaaS APM solution, an addition that can give organizations deeper insight into critical resource utilization and cloud app usage. The new monitoring measures critical system metrics for CPU, memory, network activity and processes, and delivers them in context with application performance and end-user monitoring data in a single dashboard.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!