The world’s top public clouds are able to accommodate as much data as an organization can throw at them, but that scalability often proves a double-edged sword when it comes to controlling costs. That challenge that returned to the fore last week after Komprise Inc. raised $6 million in funding to address the lack of visibility that prevents storage administrators from dealing with their redundant files.

Its namesake management service promises to provide a centralized view of capacity utilization across cloud and on-premise environments along with the means to act on that information in order to eliminate inefficiencies. The new capital from Canaan Partners will help build out that value propositions with more features to help organization cut down on their storage sprawl.

But while technology from Komprise and other management providers is helping remove duplicate information, the pursuit of data insights is simultaneously driving an increase in the amount of new knowledge flowing into the enterprise from external cloud sources. Salesforce.com Inc. hopes to help its customers put that data to use with a new series of role-specific services introduced on the same day as the startup announced its $6 million funding round.

The first Wave Analytics App targets sales executives with capabilites for identifying the factors influencing the performance of their teams, forecast revenue growth based on those insights and single out the parts of their operations in need of streamlining. Tidemark Inc. hopes to provide similar visibility for accounting professionals, an ambition that earned it $25 million in funding against the backdrop of the launch.

The money will go towards accelerating the development of the company’s cloud-based financial planning platform, which provides the same kind of pre-packaged analytics functionality that Salesforce is promising to salespeople, complete with built-in forecasting and visualization features. The round was led by Workday Inc. and included participation from all of Tidemark’s existing investors, among them Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Photo via Pattys-photos