VSS Monitoring, a network traffic monitoring company, has taken $ 20 million in growth equity from Battery Ventures. The funding was the first for the company — founded in 2003 — and it will be used for R&D and to accelerate the company’s expansion. What’s noteworthy is that until this point, VSS had built network monitoring software and hardware and sold it for five years without taking venture capital.
“This is a unicorn company,” said Neeraj Agrawal a general partner at Battery Ventures. “How often do you find a company that’s this old and shipping product in the middle of Silicon Valley with no VC investment?”
However, VSS is now at the helm of several different trends in the data center. Virtualization is magnifying the amount of traffic coming from a single server and creating network bottlenecks, while the increase in all-IP services makes it more difficult to monitor the different types of traffic flowing through the networks because it all begins to look the same. VSS offers what it calls intelligent distributed traffic capture to monitor networks and enforce security and network performance polices.
These sorts of products are likely to become more essential as enterprises rely on everything from software to actual processing power delivered as a service. If everything is stored in the cloud, ensuring that information can move within the cloud and then to a user in a certain amount of time is critical: hence Battery’s excitement over VSS. I wrote about this issue all the way back in 2008, and given this deal and CA’s buy of NetQoS last year — as well as Compuware’s buy of Gomez a month later – it looks like Battery’s making a bet that could pay out soon.
Related GigaOM Pro research (sub req’d): For Open Cloud Computing Look Inside Your Data Center
