SnapVolumes Secures $2.3 Million Seed Financing

SnapVolumes, Inc. in Los Altos, CA, a new company focused on application lifecycle management in virtual, cloud and physical environments, has emerged from stealth mode with an angel investment of $2.3 million from industry executives.

Founded in 2010 by virtualization, Windows kernel and security experts, Matthew Conover, Shaun Coleman and Matthieu Suiche, SnapVolumes focuses on the issues of supporting a mixed environment of virtual desktops, servers and cloud computing while fully leveraging the virtual infrastructure.

As more companies move to the cloud, IT departments are struggling to adapt their enterprise applications to the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud computing. Traditional tools that managed applications in the world of physical servers and desktops are ill-suited for virtual environments. This leads to substantial overhead and costs associated with application deployment, support, management, storage and infrastructure.

A recent analyst report predicts a virtualization management gap in excess of $100 billion and growing, increasing pressure on IT and the need for automating application deployment and management. To address market needs, SnapVolumes has developed a new approach to enterprise application life-cycle management that takes advantage of virtualization and modern storage technologies such as SSD. SnapVolumes supports all server, desktop and custom/legacy applications without requiring streaming, packaging, or sequencing and is more robust than current layering solutions.

SnapVolumes is led by  CEO Raj Parekh, former CEO of Virident and CTO/VP, engineering at Sun Microsystems.

SnapVolumes has already attracted top engineering talent from VMware, Citrix, EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and Trend Micro.

The SnapVolumes Board of Directors is drawn from business leaders and technologists with experience in virtualization and cloud computing, and include:

• Henrik Rosendahl, successful serial entrepreneur and CEO of Thinstall (acquired by VMware in 2008);
• Klaus Oestermann, Group VP, GM of Cloud Networking at Citrix Systems; and
• Prashant Shah, former D at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Participants in the angel round include TiE Angels of Silicon Valley and industry executives and visionaries such as the founder and former CTO of Brocade Kumar Malavalli, SVP of technology at SAP Labs Sanjog Gad, and the CEO of Infoblox Rob Thomas.

Executives from Symantec, EMC, Citrix, and TIBCO also participated in the round.

"SnapVolumes has the potential to fundamentally change the way that enterprise desktops, server and cloud platforms are managed," said Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst with Entelechy Associates. "The ability for IT to easily adapt their enterprise applications to the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud computing is a remarkable benefit. SnapVolumes technology is the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen."

"The opportunities for SnapVolumes from both a technology and partnership perspective are exciting, and I look forward to being involved with such a distinguished team and group of advisors," said Rosendahl, chairman, SnapVolumes. "My experience at Thinstall and VMware in application delivery and virtualization provided me with unique insight into the issues that can arise in a converged infrastructure environment. I believe SnapVolumes is in a strong position to help solve these new-world data center challenges."

SnapVolumes’ executive team brings experience
in virtualization and software development:

• CEO Raj Parekh – co-founded Virident Systems in 2006 and served as CEO and chairman. He has been a member of the senior business and technology executive teams of technology companies including Sun Microsystems as CTO and VP of engineering of all system products, and as VP and GM of Java products for Sun. Before joining Sun, he was VP and GM at Silicon Graphics managing all chip development including ‘Geometry Engine’ and several system products. Raj also co-founded Redwood Ventures served as executive managing partner and chairman. He has served as board member and/or chairman of the board at more than 15 high tech companies, including Magma, Niksun, Pranalytica, eGtran, Virident, TiE Angels, PubNub and Aspex. He holds 11 issued patents.
• CTO and founder Matthew Conover – former technical director for Symantec Research Labs, where he was a contributor to the company’s virtualization strategy. Prior to his eight years at Symantec, he held various research and engineering roles at Network Associates and BindView. As a pioneer in the field of Windows security his research has been cited in numerous publications such as "Writing Secure Code" by Microsoft Press. He holds 16 issued patents.
• VP of products/marketing and founder Shaun Coleman – formerly director of product management for Citrix XenDesktop, Coleman has also worked at VMware where he was the first hire in the desktop virtualization group where he managed the first releases of VDI/VMware View. He founded the security start-up company Reconnex (acquired in 2008 by McAfee) and has held various senior management positions at Proofpoint, RSA Data Security, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and Sandia National Labs. He holds 3 issued patents.
• Chief scientist and founder Matthieu Suiche – As one of the youngest Microsoft MVPs, he is a Windows OS and security expert. He also worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (Dutch Nederlands Forensisch Instituut) as part of the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, has worked for the European Aeronautic Defense and Space company, and contributed to the Samba open source project.

"Running many VMs on a single server has greatly reduced the number of physical servers needed, giving an enormous CAPEX savings. However, OPEX continues to increase proportional to total number of VMs," said Parekh. "The problem of application management is obviously in need of a new solution. Without that, the ever expanding virtualization management gap will simply stall cloud momentum. Such a solution must be fully automated, fit seamlessly with all clouds, hypervisors, OSs and apps. It must be secure, easy to use and fit with existing tools from major players like VMware, Citrix, Dell and Microsoft. There exists no such product in the market today with these attributes. At SnapVolumes, we are developing a patent-pending solution to address critical issues, reduce CIO headaches and save millions of dollars in operational expenses ‘in a snap.’ Due to the size of the opportunity and urgent need from customers, we plan to form key partnerships with industry leaders as we complement their solutions."