Symplified, a cloud security company based in Boulder, Colorado, with offices in Silicon Valley, Washington DC, and Boston, has closed a $9.2 million Series B round of venture capital financing, bringing its total funding to $18.8M.
Symplified helps companies utilize cloud infrastructure and applications by providing single sign-on, access control and user management in its identity service. In 2010, the company launched “Trust Cloud,” which integrates Symplified technology with Amazon Web Services, which Symplified says is the only identity and access management solution woven into the fabric of the Amazon EC2 platform and capable of delivering cloud security services on a “massively scalable and global basis.”
The company is led by Eric Olden, CEO and Jonti McLaren, COO, who co-founded Securant Technologies which grew to nearly 300 employees before its $134.5 million acquisition by RSA in 2001. Darren Platt, previously VP of Engineering at Securant, is a co-founder and CTO at Symplified.
Symplified says it grew revenue 700 percent year over year and surpassed one million licensed users for its cloud identity and access management service. It doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon and plans to raise additional Series C expansion capital later in 2011.
“2011 will be the year Infrastructure as a Service for the cloud takes off. However, in order for enterprises to take of advantage of the cloud they need fundamental security and identity management capabilities that are built specifically for SaaS apps like Salesforce and cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services,” said Eric Olden founder and CEO of Symplified.
Symplified says it is already the world’s largest pre-integrated SaaS ecosystem, now supporting 30 times more applications compared to SAML-only federation software. It’s technology is optimized for leading cloud virtualization platforms including VMware and open source offerings from Xen and Red Hat KVM. Its identity management suite for the cloud addresses Single Sign-On, Access Control and Identity Management for public and private cloud applications. And is available as an on-premises or hosted solution. Its proxy architecture works without agents or custom code to speed deployment and cut management costs by as much as 80 percent, the company claims.
The latest financing round was led by existing Symplified investors Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital, and included a strategic investment by Quest Software.
According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) latest market report, SaaS will grow at a 25.3 percent annual compound rate through 2014. However, the true potential of cloud computing will not be realized until the Cloud has an identity and trust foundation on par with the security within enterprise datacenters.
Symplified appears to be off to a good start and will be competing against the companies such as CA Technologies, which has made Identity and Access Management a prime initiative in its portfolio of security products. Will Symplified continue to grow in the years ahead as a standalone company, or will it be eaten up by a larger enterprise technology vendor?
