Funding

VM6 Software, provider of the only all-in-one IT virtualization infrastructure software, today announced that it has closed a $4 million series A round of investment with RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners.

The investment will further accelerate VM6 Software’s customer expansion, future software development and marketing and sales efforts worldwide. Additionally, industry veteran Stephen Pollack has joined VM6 Software’s board of directors, along with Richard Fade from Ignition Partners and Jean-David Begin from RBC Venture Partners.

VM6 VMex software offers small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) an all-in-one IT infrastructure solution that is designed to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization to manage, provision, consolidate and protect distributed servers and desktop environments at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The VM6 VMex solution eliminates the need for SMBs to centralize the infrastructure, hire and train specialized experts, and integrate expensive multi-point solutions for server and desktop virtualization, high availability, storage and management.

Pollack is a seasoned entrepreneur and industry expert with more than 25 years of experience in the high-technology market.  His most recent success started in 2003 with the founding of PlateSpin Ltd., a recognized industry leader in the virtualization market, which was purchased by Novell.

In addition to recently joining the Microsoft BizSpark One program, VM6 Software also announced the general availability of its VM6 VMex Enterprise Edition, which leverages Microsoft Hyper-V™ to combine virtualization with shared storage, advanced clustering, and intuitive management and monitoring. Customers using VM6 VMex are managing the network, desktops, applications, and physical and virtual servers as objects within their environments, all without the need for any external shared storage.  With a single console to manage the entire enterprise or each site individually, administrators can easily manage up to 65,000 distributed objects.

Kaviza has announced that Citrix Systems has made a strategic investment in the company.

The investment will serve for Kaviza’s continued development of its VDI-in-a-box offering and to fuel its growing global sales and marketing momentum.

Kaviza VDI-in-a-box is designed specifically to fit departmental budgets and desktop IT expertise, and is a simple and affordable solution for SMEs and managed service providers.

VDI-in-a-box scales on a grid of inexpensive commodity hardware without requiring shared storage — enabling desktop IT to deploy VDI, or hosted virtual desktops, for a total cost/desktop of less than $500. This innovative approach makes VDI less expensive than personal computers and generates immediate return on investment (ROI).

MokaFive this morning announced that it has raised a $21 million Series C round led by NGEN Partners, with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners participating.

The company’s flagship product, MokaFive Suite, enables corporations to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of managing distributed computing endpoints. The MokaFive Suite achieves this by providing the IT organization complete management control in delivering a secure virtual computing environment to any hardware platform — Mac or PC — offering users flexibility and choice of platform. CIOs can now leverage the growing demand by employees seeking to utilize their own computers for both personal and professional use.

Unlike server hosted virtual desktop solutions, such as VDI, MokaFive executes locally on computing end points, hence providing better performance and offline access while reducing the need for large server infrastructures.

(Via TechCrunch)

Altor Networks, provider of security for virtualized data centers and clouds, today announced that the company has closed a Series B funding round with new investors DAG Ventures, Juniper Networks with its newly announced Junos Innovation Fund, Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, Altor’s founding investors.

This new financing of $10 million will enable Altor to significantly expand global sales and marketing. Altor recently completed a record fiscal quarter, despite the challenging economic environment, adding customers of all sizes in all verticals including the financial sector, higher education and cloud service providers.

“Altor impressed us with its superior technology and deeply experienced team in the realm of virtual security. The challenges of virtual and cloud security are real and prevalent, presenting an enormous market opportunity. We’re enthusiastic about Altor’s market-leading products and unique approach to addressing these emerging security gaps,” said John Caddedu, Managing Director at DAG Ventures.

We urge you to find out more about Altor’s  approach to virtualization and cloud security at www.altornetworks.com.

Marathon Technologies has closed a third tranche of a $13.5 million round of Series B venture financing, according to a SEC filing.

The funding amount represents the total raised over three closings of a sale of Series B-1 convertible preferred stock, according to the regulatory filing, which was an amendment to a form filed in December 2008. The company, which makes fault tolerance software for mixed virtual and hardware environments, brought in the funding from 10 investors not disclosed in the filing.

In September, Littleton-based Marathon hired former IBM vice president Jim Welch as CEO. In August, the company raised $7 million in equity financing.

Founded in 1993, the company went through a bankruptcy reorganization in 2003. Since then, Marathon has raised at least $27.8 million from backers including Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture and Sierra Ventures.