New Venture Funding to Help Trigence Expand

Trigence Corp. plans to double its Canadian and U.S. workforce in the next year with $8 million in new funding.

The five-year-old startup makes business software designed to improve performance of corporate data storage. It declined to reveal current head ount, but is believed to have about 20 Ottawa employees.

The funding round was led by GrowthWorks, a new investor, with support from previous investors Vengrowth Capital Partners and BDC Venture Capital. The company has now raised $17.5 million since its first round in 2004.

Trigence was founded by former Nortel executives. It hired David Roth, formerly with Hewlett-Packard and other companies, as chief executive in April 2005.

Mr. Roth said more than 20 companies tested the Trigence AE 3.0, the latest version of its software, last year and some made purchases. The company will start announcing deals soon.

Mr. Roth said, "The current state of application management is inflexible, leaving most organizations with an overburdened data centre marked by increased cost and inefficiencies."

He said partnerships with big technology players like BMC and Sun have accelerated Trigence's access to the global markets. "We are hopeful that new relationships with VMWare and Novell will have similar success."

In addition to a headquarters in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Ottawa development operations, Trigence plans to expand operations in other parts of North America and into Europe.

The new funding is expected to carry the expansion plan for about 18 months.

Trigence is aiming its products at companies and other organizations with data centres and distributed server operations.

It said that IDC, a market researcher, estimates the current market to be 7.2 million Linux servers, growing at an annual rate of 20 per cent, and more than a million Solaris servers.

Trigence software helps organizations separate applications from operating systems into manageable assets on these computer centres.

GrowthWorks vice-president Tim Lee said, "The management of applications is one of the major line items on a company's information technology balance sheet. As this issue grows in complexity and scope, Trigence can take advantage of a significant opportunity."