NEWS RELEASES

Virtual Iron Raises $8.5 Million - Intel Capital Leads Series C Round

Acton, MA, September 26, 2005 – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of data center virtualization and management software solutions, today announced that it has secured $8.5 Million in venture capital funding in its’ Series C round with the option to raise an additional $2 Million with a strategic go-to-market partner. New investor Intel Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital Partners and Matrix Partners. The funding will be used to further product development and to expand sales and marketing capabilities. As part of today’s announcement, Virtual Iron and Intel have also signed a collaboration agreement.

“With this funding we will be able to not only further product development, but also expand our sales and marketing efforts to achieve our goal of being the solution of choice for enterprise customers to manage heterogeneous virtual data center environments,” said John C. Thibault, President and CEO of Virtual Iron. “We are very pleased that investors with the caliber of Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Matrix Partners have contributed to this latest round and will continue to play a strategic role in our growth.”

“ Industry momentum in the virtualization market and the category-changing technology that Virtual Iron offers made this a very attractive investment for us,” said Scott Darling, Vice President, Intel Capital. “Enabling next generation distributed virtualization solutions like Virtual Iron's, on Intel's Virtualization Technology, is strategic to Intel.”

Virtual Iron is the only company that offers enterprise-class virtualization that operates at the data center level. While first generation technologies are limited to working at the single-machine level or with small clusters of machines, Virtual Iron manages the aggregation and sharing of many machines and devices including server, storage and network resources. This enables enterprises to automate many time-intensive, manual tasks such as provisioning new servers, moving capacity to handle increased workloads, and responding to availability issues. In the Virtual Iron environment, any application can run on any machine, or be moved to any other machine without disrupting the application or operating system. Plus, Virtual Iron’s unique policy-based capability provides a full complement of tools to automate and control the virtual data center. With these capabilities, companies can transform the data center into a manageable, dynamic pool of shared computing resources and rapidly respond to changing business demands while dramatically reducing the cost of managing and operating their data center.

“As virtualization technology grows within the enterprise, Virtual Iron will become an increasingly attractive solution for Global 2000 companies seeking to cut costs by optimizing the use of their existing data center investments,” said David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners. “We are continually impressed with Virtual Iron’s early market validation in several large customer accounts and traction in multiple vertical market segments.”  

“Virtual Iron continues to effectively implement its business plan in bringing to market a data center virtualization and management platform that has the potential to change the economics of the enterprise data center,” said Jo Tango, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners. “ In addition, the management team has a proven ability to execute in rapidly growing industries, which strongly positions the organization going forward as it continues to expand operations.”  

About Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs is a global leader in corporate equity and mezzanine investing. To date, Goldman Sachs has formed ten investment vehicles aggregating over $17 billion of capital. These investment vehicles seek long-term capital appreciation by committing equity to high-quality companies with superior management in a variety of situations, including leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and growth investments to fund acquisition or expansion. Goldman Sachs invests across a broad range of industries and creates value through meaningful involvement with portfolio companies' strategic decision-making and operating philosophy. For more information, please visit www.gs.com/pia.

About Highland Capital Partners
Highland Capital Partners was founded with the mission of helping great people build great companies. Since its inception in 1988, the firm has taken a sector-focused and stage-diversified approach to investing in exceptional information technology, communications and healthcare companies. With over $1.8 billion of committed capital, Highland has invested in and worked to create such firms as Ask Jeeves, Avid Technology, Be Free, CheckFree, Conor Medsystems, EXACT Sciences, Lycos, MapQuest, Ocular Networks, Sybase, Telica and WebLine Communications. For more information, visit Highland 's web site at www.hcp.com.

About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel’s venture investment program, focuses on making minority equity investments to grow the Internet economy in support of Intel’s strategic interests. Intel Capital invests in hardware, software and services companies in several market segments, including computing, networking, and wire les s communications. Intel Capital has invested more than US$4 billion in approximately 1,000 companies in more than 30 countries since 1991. Since its inception, about 160 portfolio companies have been acquired by other companies and another 150 have gone public on various exchanges around the world. Intel Capital employs investment managers in about 25 countries worldwide. Last year alone, Intel Capital invested more than US$130 million in about 110 deals with approximately 40 percent of its investments made outside the United States. For more information, visit www.intel.com/capital.  

About Matrix Partners
Since its inception in 1977, Matrix Partners as been dedicated to helping outstanding entrepreneurs build industry-leading technology companies. Matrix focuses on companies that develop cornerstone technologies of the information revolution. Companies that Matrix has played a founding role in include Applix, ArrowPoint Communications, Alteon WebSystems, Bowstreet, Blue Martini Software, Clarify, FileNet, OnDisplay, Phone.com, SilverStream Software, Sonus Networks, Sycamore Networks, Tivoli Systems, Turnstone Systems, and Veritas Software.

About Virtual Iron
Virtual Iron Software, Inc. provides an enterprise-class, data center virtualization and infrastructure management platform that enables organizations to achieve optimal levels of business flexibility, operating efficiency and capital expenditure. The company serves large organizations in the financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government, retail and hosted services industries. Virtual Iron is privately held and based in Acton, Mass. For more information, visit www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.

 

Contact:
Susan Koutalakis
Racepoint Group, Inc.
781.487.4603
skoutalakis@racepointgroup.com

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