The privately held company is expected to announce today that it has secured $4m funding from General Motors Investment Management Corp, the pensions investment arm of General Motors Corp, a recent blue-chip customer.

The money will be put into Oblix’s European expansion and into the development of the next version of NetPoint, the company’s flagship access control offering, which is due to ship some time later this year.

Eubanks said the company made sales of a little over $20m in its last fiscal year, which ended January 31, some 34% more than the previous year. He said the company is not yet profitable, but it has been cash flow positive in three out of its last five quarters.

We’re not planning on raising any more money, he said. The company has been on the IPO track before, and is expected to ultimately go there again, but Eubanks would not give an expected timeframe.

Oblix opened an office in the UK, and launched French and German versions of its product in 2002, and expects to invest in new offices in Germany, France, Benelux and Scandinavia in 2003. The company faces the same rivals in Europe as in the US, Eubanks said.

The firm competes against IBM Corp’s Tivoli, RSA Security Inc and Netegrity Inc, but claims it was the first to market with a product that combines access control and identity provisioning to create an identity management suite.

The company announced a partnership with BMC Software Inc last summer whereby NetPoint would be made to work with BMC’s Control-SA provisioning software via a connector called IDLink.

I think provisioning is of increasing importance to customers, Eubanks said. We’ve worked closely with BMC over the last year and will continue to do so.

Eubanks said a deeper integration of the two products is possible, but did not rule out the possibility that the company will also partner with other provisioning software vendors.

We’ve done it a way such that we could integrate with other provisioning vendors down the line, he said. There are no such public plans at the moment.

Source: Computerwire