Virtually rolling in cash

$8M in new financing helps Trigence expand 'application virtualization' technology

Ottawa-based Trigence has raised $8 million in new financing, bringing its total venture funding to $17.5 million, the company announced yesterday.

The additional funding, led by GrowthWorks and including existing investors BDC Venture Capital and VenGrowth Capital Partners, will be used to meet demand by extending the technology to additional platforms, and accelerate sales through marketing and strategic partnership programs.

"The management of applications is one of the major line items on a company's IT balance sheet," said Tim Lee, Vice President, Investments, GrowthWorks. "As this issue grows in complexity and scope, Trigence can continue to take advantage of a significant opportunity for sustained success in this critical area of application virtualization."

MOVEABLE 'CAPSULES'

The company helps businesses manage IT applications in a virtual setting by turning programs into independent, moveable "capsules" that can be relocated within Solaris and Linux operating systems to almost any setting without the need to reinstall or reconfigure the applications.

"Application virtualization is fundamentally changing the way IT departments view application management," said David Roth, president and CEO of Trigence.

"The current state of application management is inflexible, leaving most organizations with an overburdened data centre marked by increased cost and inefficiencies. 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 companies with data-centre and distributed server environments. IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, estimates the current worldwide market at 7.2 million Linux servers, growing at an annual rate of 20%, and over 1 million Solaris servers. Additionally, analysts are predicting more than 40% of new server demand to be virtualized by 2010.

"Application management is a difficult, yet critical challenge for all IT organizations. However, Trigence offers organizations a new approach by enabling them to run legacy applications on new hardware and operating systems - eliminating costly migration pains," said Ron Warburton, director, BDC Venture Capital.