Funding

Pano Logic today announced it has secured $20 million in a Series C round of financing led by venture capital firm Mayfield Fund. Pano Logic also announced that Mayfield’s Chaddha is joining Pano Logic’s board of directors. Chaddha is a veteran entrepreneur and venture investor, ranked on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 dealmakers at No. 11 in 2009 and No. 10 in 2008.

The funds will be used to support continued technology innovation and global market expansion of Pano Logic’s breakthrough zero client virtual desktop computing platform, which is redefining the economics of endpoint computing. Unlike all other virtual desktop solutions, the Pano System removes 100% of the processing power from the desktop to the data center, fully centralizing management and eliminating endpoint complexity with one complete solution.

Pano Logic, which tripled sales in 2009, solves major challenges inherent in the current PC-based, client-server computing model, while providing end users with the same, familiar PC-like Windows experience. Its technology radically reduces computing total cost of ownership, by as much as 67 percent, by eliminating endpoint device management, support and obsolescence. Instead, end users connect to their virtual machine with a zero client that contains no processor, no operating system, no memory, no drivers, no software and no moving parts. This represents a major shift from highly complex and costly PC and thin client computing solutions.

In other news, the company today openly published its hardware specifications for the industry’s only true zero client device. Pano Logic unveiled its Zero Client Reference Architecture, proving there is absolutely no processor in its device, and challenged other vendors claiming to offer zero client solutions to publish their own specifications.

Pano Logic also announced it will license its patent-pending Pano Direct and Pano Management software and connection broker technology to OEMs seeking to bring to market new zero client solutions based on its reference architecture.

HyTrust announced today that it has scored $10.5 million in Series B financing.

New investors Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems participated in the round of financing, as did existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Len Rand, partner at Granite Ventures, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Directors. HyTrust will use the capital to drive development, sales and marketing, and fuel the company’s next stage of growth.

Thanks to its numerous benefits and proven return on investment, virtualization has taken the IT world by storm. However, IT organizations in industries such as banking, retail, government and healthcare are appropriately reluctant to virtualize systems that handle critical sensitive data and are subject to compliance.

HyTrust changes the game, enabling them to maximize their return on investment and broadly adopt virtualization, with assurance that controls are firmly in place. By enabling a single point of control over the entire virtual infrastructure, HyTrust empowers customers to confidently virtualize additional servers—even those subject to compliance—by delivering enterprise-class controls for access, accountability, visibility and configuration.

Stealthy start-up Nicira got some backing from VMware founder Diane Greene and is developing a network operating system designed to virtualize networks and create networks ideal for cloud deployments. Nicira’s founding team comes out of Stanford University, where Greene’s husband and VMware co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, is a professor in computer science.

he start-up’s CEO is Steve Mullaney, who has held executive positions at Palo Alto Networks, Blue Coat, Cisco and other companies. Nicira’s co-founders also include Scott Shenker and Nick McKeown, who are computer science professors at Stanford University.

Nicira investors also include the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz formed by two ex-Netscape execs, and Andy Rachleff, a partner at Benchmark Capital.

Nicira raised one equity round of $9 million and another of $4 million, according to a VentureBeat article.

Founded in 2007, the company is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Viewfinity last week  announced $9 million in B-round funding from Giza Venture Capital, JK&B Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.

This announcement comes in tandem with the expansion of Viewfinity’s advisory team and newest board members, Greg Butterfield and Nilanjana Bhowmik.

Systems management icon Greg Butterfield, former CEO and Chairman of Altiris, is renowned for his business achievements that include the growth and mergers/acquisitions of WordPerfect to Novell, Vinca to Legato, Altiris to Symantec and Omniture to Adobe. Greg’s proven success in the systems management space and his alignment with Viewfinity’s vision and direction will help speed Viewfinity’s growth and ensure that business decisions and technology vision are ahead of the market.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, Viewfinity offers cloud-based systems and privilege management solutions that allow IT departments to focus on managing systems and not the infrastructure. The cloud-computing model enables systems management support almost immediately so that administrators can begin managing the environment from anywhere and at anytime, for both local and mobile workers. Viewfinity’s expertise in application virtualization serves as the foundation for new levels of advancement in cloud-based systems management, providing more granularity and control than ever before possible with traditional systems management platforms.

Viewfinity introduces several new business and technology icons to its Advisory Board:

• Dwain Kinghorn, former CTO of Altiris and VP with Symantec, Founder & CEO of Computing Edge
• Stuart Schaefer, former CTO and Founder of Softricity and Partner Architect at Microsoft
• Srinivasa Venkataraman, former CEO of Appstream and VP R&D for ZoneLabs
• Benny Schnaider, former CEO and Founder of Qumranet, Pentacom and co-founder of P-Cube