Trigence secures $8M round of funding for virtualization tech

Ottawa-based Trigence has received an $8-million round of funding, bringing its total venture capital amount to $17.5 million.

The new funding is led by GrowthWorks and includes existing investors BDC Venture Capital and VenGrowth Capital Partners.

The company helps firms manage their IT applications in a virtual setting, turning programs into independent, moveable "capsules" which can be relocated within Solaris and Linux operating systems to virtually any setting without needing to reinstall or reconfigure the applications.

The funding will be used to extend Trigence's virtualization technology to more platforms, as well as to improve its marketing and sales.

"The current state of application management is inflexible, leaving most organizations with an overburdened data centre marked by increased cost and inefficiencies," said Trigence chief executive officer David Roth in a statement.

"Our Series B financing allows us to accelerate the development of additional platform support for Trigence's application virtualization software to further prove that customers can gain control of how, when and where they run their applications to reduce costs, increase customer responsiveness and deliver a measurable business value."

Trigence targets businesses with data centre and distributed server environments. The company's estimated worldwide market is 7.2 million Linux servers, growing at an annual rate of 20 per cent, and over one million Solaris servers. Analysts are also predicting more than 40 per cent of new server demand to be virtualized by 2010.

Mr. Roth noted that the financing would bring the company into "positive financial status" in accordance with its business plan, as Trigence uses the funding to propel sales and strategic partnerships abroad.

"We've had successful worldwide client acceptance and established best-in-class partnerships... and I think the venture capitalists saw what was happening (with Trigence's success)," said Mr. Roth. "I think that this space that we're in for virtualization technology is just at the beginning of a wave, and we're in place to be a very scalable company."

Mr. Roth added that the company was looking to branch out in North America and in Europe, where they are currently hiring people to work with customer demand in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.