BlueStripe Software raises $8 million

BlueStripe Software, a company selling application service management solutions to help migrate and manage enterprise applications in a virtual server environment, has raised an $8 million round of funding. The investment round was led by Valhalla Partners, with BlueStripe’s initial investor, Trinity Ventures, also participating.

Trinity led the company's $5 million A round in late 2007.

BlueStripe will use the funding to continue expansion across business operations, including product development, partner and channel development, sales and marketing.

Blue Stripe CEO and co-founder Chris Neal tells TechJournal South the 22-employee company will be hiring "across the board" on the heels of this round.

Gene Riechers from Valhalla Partners has joined the Blue Stripe board.

Founded in 2007, the company says FactFinder is the industry’s only solution to enable enterprises to stage, deploy, and manage business-critical applications during physical to virtual (P2V) conversions, new application roll-outs, and production deployments.

The product is designed to bridge the gap between enterprise applications and the new virtual environments and eliminate barriers to migrating and managing business critical applications on virtual server platforms.

BlueStripe has garnered extensive attention since first launching the company and its product, FactFinder, in September of 2008.

In November, Network World selected BlueStripe as one of its "10 IT Management Start-Ups to Watch." In September, it was named a Best of VMworld 2008 Finalist by TechTarget Inc.'s SearchServerVirtualization.com in the application and infrastructure management category. The company was also named as a finalist in the Early Stage Company of the Year category for the North Carolina Technology Association’s 2008 NCTA 21 Awards.

How did it garner all that attention, not to mention raising a round in this economy?

"I’d love to say it’s because we launched the right product at the right time."

Companies large and small are struggling to save every dime in this economy and virtualization helps do that on several fronts, from hardware to energy.

"The number one driver of server-side virtualization deeper into the data center is that it makes sense in controlling your costs," Neal says.

"The IT management problems that BlueStripe set out to solve — application visibility and management capabilities across any environment — are certainly resonating with the market."

Neal says the company is selling to clients across "all the major verticals."

"This additional funding allows us to accelerate our growth and expand our capabilities for customers moving to new platforms, such as cloud or virtual infrastructures, enabling them to change the way they manage their business-critical applications," Neal says.