Cluster Computing:

EMIC NETWORKS SECURES $7.5M IN FUNDING

Emic Networks announced that it has raised US $7.5 million of new equity capital in a preferred stock financing. Trident Capital and Nordic Venture Partners jointly led the round, with participation from Ledstiernan. The new financing brings the total capital raised to date to US$10 million, including prior funding from Ledstiernan and Aura Capital. The current round of funding will be used to grow the business in the United States and overseas.

Emic's Application Cluster (EAC) products are designed to provide best price/performance cluster platform for horizontal scaling of Open Source database and Web Enterprise applications. EAC scales economically from small and medium size environments to high-end server platform environments. EAC's benefits include performance scalability and load balancing, fault tolerance and high availability with fast fail-over, and centralised cluster management. EAC products and services are available worldwide, and may be purchased directly from Emic Networks or through an international network of reseller and systems integration partners, including MySQL AB. EAC customers include CCBill.com, Securities America, T-Mobile, The Jaxara Group and Valimo Wireless.

"Emic has built a leadership position in the Open Source market through the strength of their management team and by positioning the company as the main source for clustering solutions for leading open source server applications," said Donald R. Dixon, Managing Director at Trident Capital. "Their solution offers companies the lowest TCO for high-availability database and web enterprise applications, and positions the company for significant growth."

"New breed of database and web enterprise applications are heavily relying on Open Source technologies. In this market, there is a clear need for high availability and efficient load balancing," said Tero Mennander, partner at Nordic Venture Partners. "We have been very selective in our investments, and Emic Networks definitely made the grade."

"We received a strong response from high-quality investors and are very pleased to have leaders such as Trident and NVP invest in us," said Mr. Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Emic Networks. "This investment represents a resounding affirmation of Emic's technology leadership, our business model and the results our team has achieved to date with efficient use of earlier funding. With this infusion of funding, we are well-positioned to achieve our next major milestone -- expansion."