June 16, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Server automation and virtualization software firm SWsoft today announced that it has received funding from Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Intel Capital. Previously financed by its founders and cash from operations, this funding represents the first institutional investment in SWsoft and will be used to accelerate its global presence in both the enterprise and service provider markets. In combination with the funding, Intel and SWsoft announced a technology and marketing collaborative agreement.
“SWsoft serves the rapidly expanding hosting and enterprise markets for server automation and virtualization,” said Mike Triplett, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. “The company represents a compelling opportunity due to its experienced management team and its track record of several years of strong revenue performance and profitability. SWsoft joins other successful Insight Partners companies such as Quest Software, Website Pros and Aelita Software.”
“At Bessemer, we are impressed by the resurgent hosting market's rapid growth, which is reminiscent of the environment in this sector several years ago when we made investments in Verisign, Register.com and Verio,” said Jeremy Levine, Principal, Bessemer Venture Partners. “SWsoft has become a front runner due to its world-class team of engineers, several patent-pending technologies, proven solutions and business model. SWsoft is an excellent addition to our network of high growth companies.”
"SWsoft provides attractive and efficient virtualization and dynamic resource management software," said Steve Pawlowski, Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group CTO and Intel Senior Fellow. "Working in conjunction with Intel® Virtualization Technology and Intel® Active Management Technology, this software may provide a way to extend the server virtualization model across the data center for increased reliability, enhanced flexibility and lower TCO.”
As part of Intel’s strategic investment in SWsoft, the companies have entered into a technology and marketing collaboration agreement relating to SWsoft’s Virtuozzo server virtualization solution. The technical and go to market cooperation will encompass current and future 32 bit and 64 bit Intel platforms and technologies such as Intel® Virtualization Technology, Dual-Core and EM64T.
“This round of investment represents an important milestone for our company in moving to the next stage,” said Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO, SWsoft. “We have selected these investors due to their complementary strengths and strong track records in both the hosting and enterprise markets. The proceeds and relationships will be used for acquisition opportunities, broadening our partnership ecosystems, and attracting additional sales, marketing and business development talent.”
In addition, SWsoft announced that Mike Triplett from Insight Venture Partners and Jeremy Levine from Bessemer Venture Partners will join the company’s Board of Directors.
Global Solutions for Service Providers and Enterprises SWsoft powers more than 100,000 servers for service providers and enterprise customers worldwide. With its headquarters in Herndon, VA, SWsoft employs more than 500 employees in the US, Europe and Japan.
For Telcos, ISPs and hosting providers, SWsoft is the market and momentum leader and provides the only complete set of server automation and virtualization products that effectively supports virtually every type of hosting service offering on every major platform. The company’s Virtuozzo, Plesk, SiteBuilder, HSPcomplete and PEM products, transparently integrated and extended through SWsoft’s FUSION Initiative, enable the most feature rich, reliable and integrated solutions for virtualization, control panel server management, website creation, and end-to-end automation.
For enterprises, Virtuozzo for Linux and Virtuozzo for Windows create multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) on a single physical server, enabling each VPS to perform and execute exactly like a stand-alone server. Unlike hardware approaches to virtualization, Virtuozzo provides operating system (OS) level virtualization for increased performance and efficiency. Customers are leveraging Virtuozzo for server consolidation, disaster recovery, business workload and agility, capacity planning and management, smart configuration, patch testing and remote management.
