SimpliVity Raised $25 Million, Total at $43 Million

SimpliVity Corporation, provider of simplified ‘Software Defined Data Center in a Box’ solutions, has secured $25 million in Series B funding led by Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).

Existing investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures also participated in this financing round, which brings the total funding to date to $43 million.

Completing four weeks after SimpliVity emerged from stealth mode, the funding serves as validation of the transformational value of SimpliVity’s offering, OmniCube, a truly assimilated IT infrastructure platform.

"SimpliVity is at the forefront of the convergence trend that is transforming enterprise IT," said Matt Murphy, partner at KPCB. "Its flagship offering, OmniCube, leapfrogs competitive products in breadth of functionality and introduces a highly efficient, and novel data architecture. The result is an ultra-functional yet low cost data center in a box solution that addresses the most pressing issues in the data center today: cost and complexity."

Having recently launched OmniCube, SimpliVity will use the Series B proceeds to fuel its go to market activities as it prepares for a growth year in 2013.

"The customer demand that resulted from our recent launch has demonstrated that the market is starved for a solution like OmniCube," said Doron Kempel, CEO of SimpliVity. "We are thrilled to have the backing of KPCB to help fund what we expect to be a transformation in IT infrastructure. In joining Accel and CRV, KPCB helps to form a dream team of investors who provide capital, expertise and access. Based on the unprecedented early demand for OmniCube, the first order of business is to prepare for imminent hyper-growth."

OmniCube is a 2U rack-mounted IT infrastructure building block that delivers the functionality of more than 10 products for the virtual machine environment – at a fraction of the acquisition and operating cost compared to traditional infrastructure offerings. Two or more OmniCube systems are deployed together to form an OmniCube Global Federation, a massively scalable pool of shared resources that enables efficient data movement, extensive scalability, and enterprises system availability – managed globally from a single interface.

"Standing out among the many vendors to recently introduce a converged offering is SimpliVity," said Laura DuBois, program VP for Storage Systems, Software and Solutions with IDC. "SimpliVity’s OmniCube excels along two vital dimensions: scope of converged functionality that encompasses what would otherwise be delivered by as many as 10 separate products; and resource efficiency, in that all of the functionality is assimilated within a single stack, running atop virtualized shared resources. According to IDC research, customers are moving to converged offerings such as SimpliVity’s to increase time to market, improve IT staff efficiency and increase IT resource utilization."

Consulting analyst and founder of the Taneja Group, Arun Taneja explains: "The amount of activity in the emerging infrastructure HyperConvergence market is high and accelerating, and for a good reason. Complexity is still the number one issue in IT, especially in mid-size enterprises, where staffs and budgets are limited. HyperConvergence holds great promise for such customers. In fact, at Taneja Group we believe it holds promise for customers of all sizes that are seeking to simplify. Taneja Group research has found, however, that despite similar messages from vendors, not all HyperConvergence offerings are created equal. We are starting to look at two metrics: Scope of Functionality on one axis and Degree of Efficiency along the other. On that basis SimpliVity’s OmniCube stands tall, in our view. It is no surprise that Kleiner decided to invest heavily in SimpliVity after assessing the strengths and differentiation of its product."

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