VirtenSys Ltd., a U.K. fabless semiconductor company and developer in the emerging PCI Express I/O virtualization market, announced that it has closed a first round of funding in the amount of US$12 million. The financing came from a syndicate that includes Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP) and GIMV. With this Series A round of funding, VirtenSys should be able to grow its team VirtenSys Ltd., a U.K. fabless semiconductor company and developer in the emerging PCI Express I/O virtualization market, announced that it has closed a first round of funding in the amount of US$12 million. The financing came from a syndicate that includes Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP) and GIMV.With this Series A round of funding, VirtenSys should be able to grow its team, complete its product development and generate initial revenues. According to Tony Palmer, CEO of VirtenSys, “The company is ideally positioned with the backing of such a strong and experienced investor group to become the industry’s preferred supplier of PCIe I/O virtualization solutions.” New business models are also emerging with analysts predicting that by 2010, 25% of all IT services will be supplied through utility computing models, substantially increasing the requirements for more dynamic workload capabilities to meet the needs of the emerging business models. The company also claims that its technology will allow system developers to build data centers that can adapt instantaneously to any workload, self-configure and self-heal in event of failures, and operate at significantly higher utilizations than today’s systems. Tony Palmer added, “The trend towards efficient merchant solutions for the data centers, storage and networking infrastructure will continue. VirtenSys’ products will enable OEM vendors to build dynamic and tiered data centers based on cost and performance effective servers and platforms.” So what exactly does the company do? Well, VirtenSys positions itself as a company that provides critical I/O virtualization solutions to the data center, storage and networking infrastructure markets. Its products increase the servers’ utilization in the data center while decreasing the IT asset and ownership cost. Their strategy is standards compliant and is based on an evolutionary migration path that allows dramatic improvements in the value, space requirements, effectiveness, power and thermal usage of both newly installed and existing IT infrastructure. “There are major challenges facing the IT industry today trying to balance the conflicting needs of limited IT budget growth while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and improving the systems utilization and performance,” said Stuart Paterson, a Director in SEP’s Information Technology group. “Semiconductor vendors like VirtenSys are increasingly responsible to deliver cutting-edge semiconductor solutions that OEMs rely upon to meet those needs.” “VirtenSys has attracted very strong interest from the world’s leading providers of powerful networking and storage systems for the agile data center,” said Rudi Severijns, Executive Investment Manager with GIMV. “It’s a powerful backing of the differentiating technology the company has developed as well as a strong indicator for the growing need for such solutions in the market place.” VirtenSys was founded in December 2005, and has assembled an exceptional team of experts in semiconductor and system development across a wide range of protocols and technologies with background at ICL, Fujitsu, Power X and Xyratex. The majority of the team was most recently with the Integrated System Division of Xyratex. Today, the Company’s headquarters and engineering operations are located in Manchester, UK with marketing, business development and sales offices in Silicon Valley. For more information about the company and its product, visit their Web site. Software Development