Herndon, Virginia-based SWsoft has been around since 2000 but has until now relied on financing from its founders and operations to develop its server virtualization, server management, and hosting software business.
The company has now accepted a reported $12.4m in funding from Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Intel Capital to help it grow its business in both the enterprise and service provider markets.
The proceeds and relationships will be used for acquisition opportunities, broadening our partnership ecosystems, and attracting additional sales, marketing and business development talent, said SWsoft’s CEO, Serguei Beloussov.
Insight’s managing director, Mike Triplett, and Bessemer principal, Jeremy Levine, will join SWsoft’s board. The involvement of Intel, both from an investment and technology collaboration perspective, indicates that the processor giant is hedging its bets on virtualization technologies.
In March it announced that it had contributed code to the open source Xen virtual hypervisor project to enable support for the forthcoming Intel Virtualization Technology enhancements, and it continues to fund research and the ongoing development of Xen.
The deal with SWsoft will see Intel working with SWsoft on its Virtuozzo server virtualization technology for current and future 32- and 64-bit Intel processor technologies, including VT, dual-core processors and the EM64T extensions.
The server virtualization market is an emerging but competitive one, with EMC Corp’s VMware leading the charge. While Xen has come in for a lot of attention in recent months, Microsoft Corp’s announcement in April that the forthcoming Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 will support Linux could change the market.
Microsoft got into the virtualization business in early 2003 with the acquisition of Connectix, around the same time that SWsoft began working on a Windows port of Virtuozzo, which it had previously focused at Linux. The Virtuozzo for Windows product is in its second controlled release testing cycle and is due later this year.
