Q&A with Jay Litkey of Embotics

VSM: Embotics Corporation just announced an $8.4M financing deal. Can you tell us more about the company and its funding announcement?

JL: Embotics Corporation provides mid-sized to large IT organizations with a simplified cloud management platform that delivers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Embotics V-Commander continuously monitors the virtual data center to optimize the automation, deployment and configuration of IT services.

We recently closed $8.4 million in equity financing with $2.5 million from VentureLink LP and $2.5 million from Covington Fund II Inc. (Covington), with the remainder of the funds coming from other private investors. This brings our total financing to $18 million.

VSM: What will the funding be used for?

JL: The latest round of funding will be used to grow our global sales and marketing efforts, as well as to hire more software engineers. This funding comes on the back of the company’s most successful year to date. Embotics grew sales by 300 percent over the past year, and garnered 220 percent year-on-year growth in new customers.

VSM: Can you tell us about some successful deals you had this year?

JL: Yes, in January we announced a pan-European distribution deal with Magirus, a leading European IT solutions provider. This was Embotics’ first Europe-wide distribution agreement, which provided Magirus’ 6,000 resellers access to Embotics V-Commander. The software is a virtualization and private cloud management solution geared toward mid-market businesses served by Magirus resellers. The product gives resellers an out-of-the-box, cost-effective software solution to help enterprises better manage their virtualized servers and move to efficient private cloud deployments.

We’ve recently held events with Magirus to increase the success of our joint partners and customers. These events are a part of our initiatives to ensure our Value Added Reseller (VAR) partners are well equipped to exceed their customers’ expectations. We make sure our partners are able to provide end users with a viable path to the private cloud.

VSM: What can your channel partners expect from you?

JL: Our channel partners can expect to obtain new recurring revenue, with healthy margins from both services and licenses. We offer them a profitable sales model with low fulfillment costs.

We provide our partners with the real return on investment (ROI) their customers expect. End users will find that the ROI from Embotics V-Commander can be measured in hours. They will experience the transition from moving from a virtual environment to adopting private cloud computing, automation and management. They can increase their workload capacity while still seeing a solid cost savings from reclamation, asset validation and right-sizing.

VSM: How long have you been in the cloud market, and what have you seen change over the years?

JL: We have been in the market for six years now. We started off as a provider of virtualization management and we evolved into a cloud management provider as the market need changed and our customers began focusing on the private cloud. Within the next year, we see ourselves evolving to support public and hybrid cloud management environments. We hope to be ahead of the market curve.