| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Applications monitoring software maker Tideway Systems Ltd. announced Tuesday that it raised $27 million in a Series C round, bringing total investment in the six-year-old company to $37.5 million and setting it on course for a planned public offering within 18 months. The round was led by new investor Scottish Equity Partners and included previous institutional investor Apax Partners of London and individual investors, and will support expansion of sales and marketing, particularly in building Tideway's market in the U.S. The London company expects to reach positive cash flow in the fourth quarter. Tideway chief marketing officer Kelly Wenzel said the company began fundraising last summer in advance of general availability of its Foundation 7.0 product in October, and the round closed March 31. Tideway will use the new capital to continue developing its products and to expand sales channels to drive new customer acquisition. Tideway's products are aimed at IT managers of large enterprises, particularly in financial services, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and government, to provide mapping and analysis of how applications software products are used. Wenzel said the latest version of its Foundation product provides managers with information on historical usage of a company's applications, configuration and the hardware they run on. "About 40% of capital expenses at Fortune 500 companies is in IT, and managers are always trying to look for cost savings," Wenzel said. "Our end game is to give an accurate, real-time view of how these applications are used, to provide IT managers information to make better, faster, safer IT decisions." Wenzel said the company derives about half its sales from the U.S. and half from Europe, and she said the new funding will allow it to focus on boosting relationships with resellers in the U.S. market. The company sells its products primarily as packaged software, with sales beginning at about $25,000 for a basic data center audit. But implementations can range into seven figures, based on operating system licenses and roughly equating to the number of servers. Ferghal O'Riordan, a partner with Scottish Equity Partners, said he has known Tideway founder and CEO Richard Muirhead for several years and has followed the company since its formation in 2002. "I'm an old network manager, and it always astounds me how badly data centers are structured," O'Riordan said. "Data centers have expanded so rapidly, and IT managers have just added things on. But it's clear that the market is starting to understand the need to better structure them, and people need the kind of functionality Tideway offers." O'Riordan said the company is positioned to be the leader in application "dependency mapping," which gives IT managers an assessment of the importance of various software products and how efficiently they have been run. That can offer cost savings on hardware and software. Wenzel said the investment round is positioned as the final private investment. Tideway would not disclose a valuation for the current round or the names of any of its financial or legal advisers on the deal. --Clifford Carlsen
 Deal Video
    Community
 Elsewhere on The Deal.comDealwatchThe Deal MagazineCorporate Dealmaker
The Deal VideoCategories
Blog roll
Archives
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
