SimpliVity Pockets $58M Funding To Expand Converged Infrastructure Product, Channel

Converged infrastructure solution developer SimpliVity this week said it has closed a C-round of funding to the tune of $58 million, an amount the company expects will help significantly increase its headcount and R&D.

The new round of funding, which brings total funding in SimpliVity to $101 million, may also get the Westborough, Mass.-based startup to profitability, said Tom Grave, vice president of marketing.

"That's to be determined," Grave said. "We don't have plans for a D-round."

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The SimpliVity's OmniCube converged infrastructure solution packages the company's OmniStack software with commodity server, storage and networking hardware as a single managed solution.

Officially unveiled in 2012, the OmniCube was launched into general availability early this year, Grave said.

SimpliVity is expecting its headcount to triple in 2014 in order to support an expected 500-percent growth in sales over 2013, he said.

"So the new capital is going toward engineering to drive our aggressive road map, and toward increasing the sales team," he said. "And my marketing team will get bigger to help drive the growth."

That product road map includes expanding the line both upward to reach further into the enterprise market as well as downward to provide a disaster recovery platform for remote environments, Grave said. "But the will all share the core underlying OmniStack technology," he said.

SimpliVity's converged infrastructure solution allows a customer's VMware administrator to handle the tasks formerly handled by the VMware guy, the server guy, the storage guy and the networking guy, said Bryan Champagne, CTO at MSDI, a Pembroke, Mass.-based solution provider and partner to SimpliVity.

"When we have conversations with customers, they say, 'It can do what?'" Champagne said. "SimpliVity does everything in its cube, and customers don't have to worry about handling specific controllers."

Champagne said he is glad to see the new investment in SimpliVity.

"A lot of time, we see startups come to market with [their] biggest goal being to buy the fanciest office stuff they can, but not invest in the company," he said. "SimpliVity is different. You can see they're using the money for the right things. Investors like to see that. And any reseller can look at SimpliVity and see they have a mature offering."

SimpliVity is continuing to stay true to its 100-percent channel model roots for its converged infrastructure solutions, Grave said.

"Next year, we expect to double our partner base from the 100 partners we have opened so far worldwide," he said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 20, 2013