REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Racktivity, a developer of next-generation energy and uptime management platforms for data centers, announced the closing of an $8 million Series B round of financing led by Partech International, with the participation of existing investor Big Bang Ventures. The funds will be used to accelerate Racktivity's product, technology and market development initiatives. Racktivity also announced today the opening of its U.S. headquarters in Redwood City, California.
While establishing and expanding its sales presence in the U.S. and Europe, Racktivity plans to deliver its Rack Controller power distribution unit (PDU), integrated with the company's comprehensive energy and uptime management software platform, to the U.S. market during the first quarter of 2011. Racktivity's integrated solutions are intended to substantially improve uptime and reduce energy consumption, costs and carbon emissions of data centers.
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"Racktivity's management team has a well-established track record of innovating, building and growing successful companies. We believe the team's compelling vision for the next-generation power distribution framework brings new levels of energy savings and uptime improvements to data centers," said Nicolas El Baze, a general partner at Partech International, a leading venture capital firm that has been investing in IT innovators in the U.S. and Europe for more than two decades. El Baze will join Racktivity's board, along with Ashish Puri, a principal of Partech International.
"We are delighted to be partnering with a top global venture firm like Partech," said Marco DeMiroz, president and CEO of Racktivity. "We focus on the physical layer of the cloud, combining advanced PDUs with an open and extensible software platform to reduce energy consumption and improve uptime by measuring and managing their power use — while seamlessly integrating with data center applications."
Racktivity launched its Rack Controller PDUs in Europe during the summer of 2010 and received strong customer adoption as demonstrated by the addition of brand names such as Combell, Terremark Europe, Zenith Infotech Ltd., and others.
Combell, a data center hosting company serving the Benelux, has been an early adopter of Racktivity PDUs. "By using the Rack Controller, we have lowered our total cost of ownership by 65 percent and no longer need to purchase three devices to do the same thing — with the added benefit of much lower power consumption," said Benjamin Jacobs, Combell CTO.
In November, Racktivity announced that Ed Sterbenc, an accomplished sales executive with a track record of driving growth and profitability in global enterprise IT markets, has joined the company as vice president of worldwide sales.
For more information, go to www.racktivity.com.