Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The financing, which amounted to $10.25 million (£5.3m), was led by Advent Venture Partners and supported by New Zealand’s No 8 Ventures and Motorola Inc through its strategic equity investment arm, Motorola Ventures.

It is OpenCloud’s first institutional funding round and will be used to grow the management infrastructure at its new Cambridge headquarters as well as increase staff in its Asia Pacific and New Zealand facilities.

The new appointments will support sales, marketing, delivery and product development in Europe, the US and Asia Pacific and help to bring the open standard JAIN SLEE to a global market.

OpenCloud, a specialist in the supply of next generation application servers to the telecommunications industry, was incorporated in New Zealand in 2000 before setting up its global headquarters at the Cambridge Science Park in the summer of last year.

Originally manned by a staff of two, the Cambridge office has already doubled in size on the back of a £200,000 funding in May 2006 and plans to treble that number over the coming months.

Stephen Newton, Open-Cloud director and chief executive, said: “We are building up the infrastructure. As well as Simon Joles (VP Sales) in the office, we now have a CFO and professional services director. By the end of the next two to three months we will be 10 to 12 people at the Cambridge site.”

JAIN SLEE – Java Application programming interfaces (APIs) for Integrated Networks, Service Logic Execution Environment – is a standard applications platform intended to provide telcos with a broader and faster single standard network for its applications than currently exists.

OpenCloud and its investors believe this is of particular importance to an industry described as being on the verge of enormous change with telecoms operators and service providers looking to develop and deploy new applications for network architectures, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Martin McNair, general partner at Advent Ventures, said: “Development and delivery of new applications for IMS and SIP is going to flourish in the next two years as telecoms operators and service providers worldwide seek to generate new revenues.

“To ensure faster time to market of new services, an open, commonly accepted standard is needed and industry leaders recognise that JAIN SLEE is the main candidate.

“We are supporting the development of OpenCloud’s JAIN SLEE-based application servers because they meet the industry’s need for high-performance platforms supporting ‘extreme’ performance requirements.

“The company has strong growth prospects and, combined with its deployments at major telecoms operators, we believe it is well positioned to become a market leader.”

Analyst, Gartner has described OpenCloud’s leadership of JAIN SLEE with Sun Microsystems as “a visionary contribution to the software industry, advancing event-driven application servers (EDASs) and event-driven architecture (EDA).”