RightScale is an organization that's essentially positioned themselves as the intermediary between the sometimes confusing world of cloud-based server environments and the end user. I, myself, am completely fascinated with the cloud computing world, and I understand the basic principals as to how it's supposed to work.
In practice, though, I find setting up and operating most of the cloud server environments to be confusing and ultimately impossible for a life-long developer like myself (yes, I'm the type of developer all you admin types hate to have accessing your boxes - I know my way around the server just enough to muck it up so that you need to fix it at least once a week).
RightScale is an organization that sits between people like me and that confusing world - sure I understand how to use most of the server environments I can program in, but I'll stare over and over at the EC2 documentation and still not understand what it is I need to do to set up an account and get it running like I need it. RightScale does this for dolts like myself, and acts as a sort of contract admin team to solve the unique sorts of issues that can arise in that environment.
Their organization just recently raked in $4.5 million from Benchmark Capital in a Series A funding round. RightScale's CEO, Michael Crandell, came on Mashable Conversations to educate me on how their business worked and gave a good benefit and downside run-down on the prospect of moving your server's computing to the clouds.
The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.