Mimosa Adds $17M

Mimosa Systems has scored $17 million in a third round of venture funding, bringing the four-year-old firm's total to $34.5 million. The round, led by Mayfield Fund, will be used to market and enhance Mimosa's NearPoint for MS Exchange Server email archiving software -- and to expand its range.

"We realize that live content archiving is the basis for enabling a whole set of other applications," says T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa. "Once you have captured all the content in a repository over time, that enables not only email archiving, but legal discovery, end-user search, business intelligence, data protection..."

Mimosa's roadmap includes support of document archiving as well as email across heterogeneous storage platforms, Ravi says. And by the end of this year, he hopes to unveil a Sharepoint solution, adding to the Exchange support NearPoint now provides.

There isn't much time to lose. The email archiving market is on an upswing: According to the Radicati Group consultancy, it rose 70 percent in the last year and should top $5.4 billion in annual sales by 2011. That's making competition increasingly fierce, not only among fellow suppliers of email archiving software, such as EMC, HP, IBM, Symantec, and Zantaz (to name just a few), but among a growing roster of outsourcers, including Fortiva, Iron Mountain, and Zantaz.

Mimosa's competing for the same enterprise- to mid-sized organizations its rivals are -- and so far, it's garnered just a tiny slice of the pie. Still, it's managed to score a following of 160-odd customers, including 93 that were added in 2006 alone. These include Affiliated Computer Services, Sears, and Virtual Health, among others.One customer, TNCI, a provider of voice and data telecom services and products based in Boston, credits NearPoint for reducing its 100-Gbyte Exchange database by 30 percent. (See CDP + Replication = DR.) The firm no longer keeps .PST files, but sends email directly to the NearPoint server, leaving only stubs for attachments back on the Exchange server. Further, Mimosa's CDP helped cut TNCI's recovery point objective to minutes instead of 24 hours.

Another customer, the Siegfried Group LLP accounting firm, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, also lauds Mimosa's ability to streamline Exchange without adding agents to desktops or servers. "Following our Mimosa NearPoint deployment, we received numerous positive comments from our employees about the performance of our email system, said IT coordinator Frank McGurk in a prepared statement. The company's 250-Gbyte email store has been reduced 67 percent to 80 Gbytes, thanks to NearPoint's use of single-instance storage and CDP. (See Accounting Firm Turns to Mimosa.)

On the downside, Mimosa doesn't support Sharepoint or Notes, only Exchange. This places it behind Symantec, Zantaz, and others -- and puts it at a potential disadvantage in large firms where bigger vendors have a solid presence. Support for instant messaging and non-email documents, as well as Sharepoint, could help Mimosa's cause. The clock is ticking.

In addition to Mayfield Fund, Mimosa's Series C round included Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch