Bright Computing Receives $14.5 Million in Series B

Bright Computing (News - Alert), a company that helps organizations manage their Linux clusters, announced this week that it has received $14.5 million in Series B funding.

This most recent round of funding was lead by DFJ and DFJ Esprit. Prime Ventures and ING Corporate Investments, an existing investor for the company, also helped lead the charge. The announcement marks the appointment of several company members who will be joining the Bright Computing Board of Directors. These individuals are DFJ Partner Bill Bryant, Prime Ventures Partner Alexander Ribbink, DFJ Esprit Partner Richard Marsh, and ING CISO Rob Bening.

Venture Beat discusses the underlying nature of the cluster management marketplace and the growing demand for companies that help manage businesses' clusters. It says that modern computing environments can include several hundred to several thousand nodes. Naturally, that requires proper software and management expertise to be able to properly handle so many connections.

Venture Beat says Bright Computing often competes with home-grown projects that IT departments have put together themselves. Such projects tend to use multiple open source software products that work with one another, and any industry veteran knows that such a situation can become quite messy. When information is scattered from one program to another, data is bound to get lost and may be hard to access or properly utilize.

Bright Computing markets its solution as easy to use and, according to Venture Beat, says it "makes Linux clusters extremely easy to manage, even for non-Linux experts." Bright Computing's announcement mirrors this sentiment through the impressive listing of partners it has made over the five years it has been in business.

Bright Computing has worked with Dell, Cisco (News - Alert), Cray, and HP, and currently has over 400 customers -- including 20 Fortune 500 companies. Bright Computing says it will use the latest round of funding to support its efforts for global expansion and for the improvement of its cluster management technology. This technology works with Hadoop and OpenStack, and the company mentions working with organizations in the technology, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, government labs, universities, and financial services markets. Its ability to improve its integration with other cluster management products should allow it to continue to find willing partners in the above markets and in other markets across the globe.