Illumita Secures Series A

SEATTLE -- illumita, an emerging company in the burgeoning field of virtualization technology, announced today it has secured $6 million in series A funding from Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions and Washington Research Foundation. illumita was founded with technology developed in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. The funding will help illumita accelerate its product development, as well as sales and marketing activities to provide virtualization services and solutions to a range of enterprise customers.

A recent report from analyst firm IDC predicts server virtualization will become a $20 billion industry by 2010. The report also indicates $17 billion of that money will be spent on the virtualization solutions and services segment that illumita is targeting, on top of the $3.1 billion for virtualization software licenses.

illumita is also announcing several additions to its executive team. Steve Brodie recently joined the company as President. He brings more than 15 years of enterprise software development and enterprise IT consulting experience with recent executive experience at Hewlett Packard/Mercury Interactive and IBM/Rational. Also recently joining the executive team is Jonathan Weeks as VP of Engineering.

illumita further announced Brad Silverberg and Sunny Gupta are joining illumitas Board of Directors. Brad Silverberg is a founding partner at Ignition and former senior executive at Microsoft. Sunny Gupta is an experienced enterprise software executive who has been an executive at Opsware, Mercury Interactive and Rational as well as founder and CEO of iConclude.

“The time has definitely come for broader use of virtualization,” says Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group. “The combination of an impressive team of technology and industry leaders in virtualization and strong customer validation for virtual services positions illumita for market leadership. Madrona has had substantial success working with several of the illumita team members in the past and we look forward to helping them build another great company.”Illumita