NEWS

Linux cluster management Co Qlusters raises $16 million

Qlusters today announced that it has received $16 million in a private venture capital investment round.

Duff Ackerman and Goodrich LLC (DAG) led the round and Charles River Ventures were included as new investors. Current Qlusters investors, including Benchmark Partners and Israel Seed Ventures, also participated in the round.

DAG general partner John Cadeddu will join the Qlusters board of directors.

Founded in 2001, Qlusters delivers enterprise cluster management software that optimizes computing resource use for enterprise Linux applications. In August 2003, the ClusterFrame product was recognized at LinuxWorld as a Product Excellence Award finalist for “Best Cluster Solution.”

Qlusters is headquartered in Palo Alto with regional offices in New York City and Tel Aviv.

Qlusters was founded in 2001 by CEO Ofer Shushan and CTO Moshe Bar. Qlusters has raised $7.75 million to date in two financing rounds, the last in July 2002.

Shushan says Qlusters operates in a sector that is following a very important industry trend. "Enterprises are moving away from mainframe toward commodity servers. This was the easiest of all my financing rounds."

Shushan says Qlusters is already at the sales stage. "We expanded our products range basket in 2003 and worked with customers in the field, so that we had a good reputation when the market recovered, as well as in potential markets, such as banks and financial services."

Shushan says the money raised will be used to expand marketing and sales and to hire more people. Qlusters currently has a staff of 40. "We'll expand our sales and marketing in the US, and in Europe and the Far East toward the end of the year. We also want to double our R&D center by year-end."

Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on Wednesday, April 07, 2004