Emerging WAN Optimization Player Exinda Nets $12 Million Funding Round

OpenView Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates participated in the Series B round, which Exinda said will be used as working capital.

Exinda's specialty is WAN optimization using what the company calls performance assurance technology -- profiling both users and applications for a more precise form of optimization that relies on 52 unique user and application attributes. It introduced a virtual WAN optimization appliance in October.

Exinda has an active channel program focused especially on midmarket customers, and has continued to grow its upper partner classes. In mid-February, Exinda said it added 10 parters to its top-tier Platinum status.

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Michael Sharma, Exinda's CEO, said the funding is important to Exinda's critical mass. Exinda grew revenue 116 percent from 2010 to 2011, according to the company.

"We have made a significant investment in escalating our international sales operations over the last couple of years across all geographies," Sharma said in a statement. "It is this investment that has resulted in us growing at a faster rate than that of the marketplace, thereby increasing market share and expanding global reach."

Firas Rauof, a partner with OpenView Venture Partners, which first invested in Exinda in 2007, said Exinda's strength was addressing key customer challenges tied to cloud, SaaS and performance-intensive applications such as video.

"Its solutions continue to maintain market relevancy, addressing many of the major IT challenges being faced by its customers around cloud, SaaS and real-time applications such as video and the impact of these on traditional network infrastructures," Rauof said.

The fast-growing WAN optimization space has become increasingly competitive, as vendors such as Riverbed Technology, Cisco, Blue Coat and Silver Peak Systems duke it out for market share and Exinda and other emerging players hone their channel chops. In an April 2011 report, researcher Gartner pegged the WAN op market to grow tenfold over the next five years as cloud-based WAN optimization and acceleration solutions come to the fore.