Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
SANTA CLARA, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/23/08 -- Intel Capital, the global investment arm of
Intel Corporation, today announced that it has invested in the Series A
financing of REvolution Computing, creator of parallel computing software
for computational statistics. The funds will be used to advance
REvolution's product offerings and expand into new markets.
REvolution Computing provides RPro and ParallelR, which deliver the open
source 'R' statistical tool with commercial support and the power of
parallelism. Already used throughout life sciences, financial services,
manufacturing and energy, the R statistical packages are now being deployed
and supported by REvolution Computing for production, commercial, and
regulated environments.
"REvolution Computing's innovative technology provides a much-needed
solution for many industries, including financial services, health-care and
retail," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital. "This approach to
business-ready open source solutions aligns with Intel's platform strategy
and continues our commitment to investing in the open source community."
"Intel Capital has a long history of investment in open source enterprises,
beginning in 1998 with our investment in Red Hat," said Lisa Lambert,
managing director, Software & Solutions Group, Intel Capital. "We also
provided subsequent funding for innovators such as: SuSE Linux, JBoss,
MySQL, Zend Technologies, Fonality, CollabNet, and Black Duck, among
others. REvolution Computing's involvement in Intel Capital's Open Source
Incubator Program is just the latest illustration of our ongoing commitment
to fostering new business models and encouraging open source software
solutions."
This is the second investment made under the Intel Capital Open Source
Incubator Program. Founded in January 2006, the program was created
specifically to drive investments in open source projects and accelerate
the adoption of open source on Intel platforms. Intel Capital's first
investment under this program was WS02, a web services platform company
with primary operations in Sri Lanka. The program provides seed capital,
computing resources, office facilities, and solution services through
Intel's global network of IT Innovation Centers where developers work
directly with Intel engineers to develop, test, and performance tune
software for the latest Intel platforms.
"The use of 'R' has been growing steadily since 1995 and 'R' is now the
standard computational statistics package for an estimated one million
users(1) of statistical software worldwide," said Richard Schultz, CEO
REvolution Computing. "Our products for computational statistics are fully
supported, easy to use, with commercial features and automatic parallel
processing. We're excited about this investment from Intel Capital and
value their vision and commitment in this emerging segment of the market."
In conjunction with Intel Capital's investment, REvolution Computing's
Board of Directors has been expanded to include: Andre M. Boisvert, former
Oracle executive, former President and COO of SAS Institute Inc., and now
Chairman of several open source companies including Pentaho, an open source
business intelligence (BI) suite; and Michael P. Haydock, former President
and CEO of Cray Research and now VP in HP's Business Intelligence (BI)
Division. Additionally, Dr. Martin Schultz, one of the leading researchers
in parallel computation over the past 30 years at Scientific Computing
Associates has joined the company as Chief Science Officer.
"R has become the de-facto statistical language and REvolution Computing's
R-based solutions provide the necessary scale and support for its growing
commercial usage," said Andre M. Boisvert, REvolution Computing board
member. "With this investment, REvolution Computing can deliver the type
of performance that is lacking in existing business intelligence
solutions."
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, makes equity
investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide.
Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware,
software and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health,
consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing, and cleantech. Since 1991,
Intel Capital has invested more than US$6 billion in approximately 1,000
companies in more than 40 countries. In that timeframe, about 157 portfolio
companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and
another 187 have been acquired by other companies. In 2007, Intel Capital
invested about US$639 million in 166 deals with approximately 37 percent of
funds invested outside the United States. For more information on Intel
Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.
About REvolution Computing
REvolution Computing is headquartered in New Haven, CT and provides
commercial support and parallel computing enhancements for the open source
R statistical/business intelligence tool. REvolution also provides
parallel processing enhancements for a number of commercial applications.
For more information on REvolution Computing, R-Pro, and Parallel-R; visit
http://www.revolution-computing.com.
(1) Estimate based on survey conducted via useR! mailing list, 2006.
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