EARLIER:

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 , 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 " 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 -- 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.