The simplicity and scalability offered by cloud computing make the model highly complementary to analytics, as evident by the fast growing amounts of business information being shipped off-premise for processing, but decision makers are only now beginning to realize that the same  also holds the other way around.  That recognition is rapidly picking up steam thanks to the efforts of startups like CloudPhysics to harness Big Data in helping organizations bring their private infrastructure more up to par with that of the world’s largest Internet companies.

The predictive analytics firm announced on Tuesday that it has raised $15 million in a third round of funding led by Jafco Ventures with participation from existing backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mayfield. The investment marks a major vote of confidence in its value proposition, which was extended to yet another part of the data center on the same day with the release of Storage Analytics.

The feature offers capacity management capabilities and provides visibility into metrics like system health, a combination that CloudPhysics CEO John Blumenthal says can empower enterprises to run their facilities “with Google-like operational efficiency.” MongoDB users, meanwhile, can simply opt for the real deal now that the database has been made available for deployment as a ready-to-use virtual machine in the search giant’s infrastructure-as-a-service environment.

The move was announced at the company’s first annual customer conference in New York in conjunction with the news that Microsoft has too added support for the open-source database to Azure. That means MongoDB now works on all three of the largest public cloud platforms out there, a major milestone for the company as it seeks to further capitalize on the accelerating adoption of NoSQL in the enterprise.

Not to be left out of the cloud analytics action, Big Blue has unveiled a managed edition of its Navigator that can be consumed as a service from SoftLayer, the hosting provider it picked up for $2 billion last June. The offering, the fifteenth application on the recently launched IBM Cloud Marketplace, packs a well-rounded set of content collaboration, management and sharing capabilities as well as native clients for iOS and Android.  The rollout marks the latest landmark in the company’s efforts to move its on-premise portfolio to the cloud, a push that mirrors the roadmap rival SAP has been pursuing for the last several years.

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