Availigent Eyes Other Markets

Application-performance startup Availigent has clinched $12.2 million in new financing as the vendor looks to break into the enterprise market with a new Windows-based offering. (See Availigent Closes $12.2M.)

The round, which brings Availigent's total funding to around $16 million, was led by Intel Capital, and also included existing investors Diamondhead Ventures and Smart Technology Ventures. Availigent, born in 1998 as Eternal Systems, was a spin-off from the University of California, Santa Barbara, though the company changed its name earlier this year.

Availigent CEO Bud Michael told Byte and Switch that he will use the cash to enhance the startup's flagship Duration software and go after new markets outside of its current high-performance computing (HPC) niche. "We have a strategy to work with systems and data center partners to add our product [to their portfolios]," he explains, although he would not name names.

"We see a number of strategic partners that we think would work well with Duration," he adds. The startup is already working with HP, which offers Duration on its Linux-based XC clusters.

Duration is certified for a range of applications, including Oracle 9i, Sybase, and MySQL, as well as number of hardware platforms, such as HP's ProLiant, IBM's BladeSystem, and Egenera's BladeFrame.Essentially, Duration monitors Linux-based applications for faults, such as a storage or server node crashes. According to Michael, the product can also migrate applications around a data center, and the exec is now planning to expand beyond Linux into the Microsoft arena. "We're going to release at the end of this year a Windows-supported product," he says.

To support that, Availigent will grow its 20-strong workforce to around 50 people over the next 12 months, with the bulk of the new hires in engineering. "We're not going to be hiring a huge sales organization; our strategy is to use partners," says Michael.

As part of its software, Availigent also offers a service called Checkpoint, which captures a memory and storage image of the application. This enables users to quickly restore their applications in the event of a problem.

But Michael is adamant that Availigent will not be coming up against continuous data protection (CDP) vendors such as Atempo, IBM, FalconStor, Revivio, and EMC. (See IT Heavies Reshape CDP, Insider: CDP Is Work in Progress, FalconStor Delivers CDP, and EMC Coughs Up for Kashya.) "We view them as complementary," he explains. "Our focus is on the application."

Until now, Availigent has won the bulk of its deals in the HPC space, including a major deployment at the Petrochina Company's Bureau of Geophysics (See Availigent Provides Safety Net.) Now, however, the vendor is taking aim at new areas such as the financial sector and enterprise VOIP services. "We enable continuous application availability on commodity component IT infrastructures," explains Michael. "If you don't have any IT resources available, business stops."James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch