By Deborah Gage Of DOW JONES VENTUREWIRE Citrix Systems Inc. (CTXS) co-founder and technology veteran Ed Iacobucci has launched VirtualWorks Group, a company that aims to help corporations control the proliferation of data across their enterprises. The company has raised an $8 million Series A round from a combination of unidentified institutional and individual investors, in both the U.S. and Europe, and claims revenue of $2 million from more than 300 active customers. Pre-money valuation was $8 million, according to Iacobucci, who is VirtualWorks' co-founder, chairman and chief executive. Digital data has grown nearly tenfold in the last five years, to more than 1,700 exabytes worldwide, according to IDC, and Iacobucci pegs it to three trends--virtualization, cloud computing and mobile devices, all of which create more data and more places where it can be located. As a result, IT workers are becoming less productive. Even as they get more advanced tools to rapidly create virtualized servers, for instance, they may spend hours every week just looking for things. "We can create more pockets of information faster than we ever dreamed possible," Iacobucci said. "That, coupled with a lot of storage, means it's a logical problem and not just a physical problem--it can be broken and scattered into respositories, under different security. It's interesting." VirtualWorks was incorporated in 2009 after acquiring the assets of a Norwegian search company called InfoFinder AS. Enterprise search doesn't solve the data sprawl problem, Iacobucci said, although it's part of the solution. What is needed, though, he decided, is the ability to easily find all versions of a file, no matter where those versions reside--on different servers, storage systems, mobile devices, home computers and so on. "Microsoft Word doesn't tell you anything useful. It says what do you want to open and where is it? The user has to figure that out all by themselves," he said. VirtualWorks is building a vendor-agnostic, three-tier software platform that will organize any type of data and abstract its contents into common flat records in a universal index. Since it runs on virtual machines, it can be moved around as needed. Iacobucci said the platform will not require IT workers to modify current corporate software and will give employees a single view of their data, regardless of where it's located and what format it's in. Target customers are mid-sized businesses that can't afford high-end consultants, IT people and document management systems. "If you're a hospital with 400 to 500 employees, you're out of luck," he said. Iacobucci also founded DayJet Corp., a flying taxi service that collapsed in the 2008 recession, and he said he wasn't sure what he should do after that or how he would re-enter the technology space. But when he saw InfoFinder, he said, it made him realize there was a hole in the enterprise software market, not for search but for something more comprehensive. The Series A may take VirtualWorks to cash-flow positive, and the company expects to be at about 40 employees by the end of the year. Sales partners and new products that plug into the VirtualWorks platform are expected to be announced this summer. -By Deborah Gage, Dow Jones VentureWire, 415-439-6653; deborah.gage@dowjones.com
