Stealth Virtualization from Illumita Raises $6M

Illumita, an emerging company in the virtualization technology field, has secured $6 million in Series A funding.

The money raised is expected to help the stealth company accelerate its product development and get its first product to market. The money came principally from Madrona Venture Group and Ignition Partners, as well as additional funding from its initial seed investors, Bezos Expeditions and Washington Research Foundation.

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.

So what exactly is this stealth company targeting? According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the company isn’t seeking to compete directly with existing virtualization platforms. Instead, they are developing services that build on such software. The company’s President, Steve Brodie, told the publication that Illumita is working on something they call “virtualization over the Internet”, which was described as taking “all or some of the data center operations and moving it into the Internet cloud.”

Brodie also told the Business Journal that the company is targeting Microsoft and XenSource as potential partners. He also said that the company is testing its services with 10 companies but declined to name them or give a timeline for when the services would be commercially available.

The company is currently located in Seattle’s Pioneer Square with 10 employees working on the technology first developed by a group of scientists in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Steve Brodie recently joined the company as its President, along with Jonathan Weeks as VP of Engineering, and Brad Silverberg and Sunny Gupta joined the company’s board of directors.

“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.”

“Virtualization is the next great wave of technology, and it’s happening now,” adds computer industry pioneer and Ignition founding member Brad Silverberg. “illumita has developed impressive virtualization technology that is the basis for an innovative computing solution we believe will have wide impact. We are impressed with the company’s depth of talent and strategic direction and are very excited about the future of illumita.”