It has been reported by Private Equity Hub that Waltham, MA-based virtualization software company Leostream finally completed a $3 million Series A round of funding which was led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital. What's particularly interesting about this news to me is that I have somewhat of a personal history with Leostream. You see, Leostream is one of the oldest third-party virtualization software companies It has been reported by Private Equity Hub that Waltham, MA-based virtualization software company Leostream finally completed a $3 million Series A round of funding which was led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital.What’s particularly interesting about this news to me is that I have somewhat of a personal history with Leostream. You see, Leostream is one of the oldest third-party virtualization software companies still around in this space. In the early days, VMware and Connectix were fighting it out as the two key server virtualization platforms on the market. However, neither company did a very successful job at managing their environments – let alone the thought of trying to manage each other’s platform. It was around 2002 when Leostream entered the virtualization market, and it was a small pond to fish in back then. I was working at a company called ProTier, and we were joined by a third company called PlateSpin. All three pioneering companies began fishing in the same virtual pond with their own virtualization management product that could manage both VMware and Connectix environments (Yes folks, we were doing heterogeneous virtualization management before it was cool). As the pond grew larger and more people started adopting virtualization technology, all three companies started to move away from just simply trying to manage the virtual environment. At ProTier, we were the first to create a new market space which has since been dubbed “virtual lab automation”. Our company was acquired by Surgient Networks in April 2003, and it still lives on today as Surgient, Inc., still creating virtual lab automation provisioning software (although I am no longer there). In March of 2008, PlateSpin was acquired by Novell. The company has gone from server management to P2V migrations and now offers a disaster recovery solution. Leostream on the other hand has survived this long without Venture Capital funding. The company transitioned from virtualization management software to a P2V migration solution (P>V Direct) and finally settled on a VDI Connection Broker as it looked toward the hosted desktop market. The company’s founder, David Crosbie, is still with the company and is currently their CTO. Mike Palin is Leostream’s CEO, and it is expected that Palin will discuss the investment details in more depth in the coming weeks. One thing is certain, Leostream has a lot of work to do. The VDI market is poised to take off, however, they are going to be going up against the virtualization platform vendors themselves (VMware now has its own Connection Broker) as well as a host of new VDI vendors now entering the market. The company has made it this far and this long without any VC funding, so let’s see what this virtualization player has up its sleeve after getting $3 million. Stay tuned. Software Development