Vision Software Inc says it has now completed a third major round of funding, totaling $11.2m and taking its total up to $36m. The four year-old Oakland, California-based company’s initial funding round was led by Hambrecht & Quist and included Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures Inc and Charles River Venture Partners. By the second round in 1997 (CI No 3,089), Vision’s application server business logic technology, Jade, was attracting individual investors from the IT world. These included database pioneer, Gary Morgenthaler; ex-Informix Corp chairman, Roger Sippl; and Kanwal Rekhi, former chief technical officer of Novell Inc. Morgenthaler, who is chairman of the board and very active within the company, led the discussions over the new funding round, which bought in eight or nine new investors, both corporations and individuals. Full details are due to be announced next week. Vision CEO, Jack Hewitt says the company’s business grew three- fold last year, and expects the same kind of growth in 1999. Within a year, the company should be profitable, he said, and on track for an initial public offering by mid 2000. The new funding will be used to ramp up sales and marketing. Vision currently has 120 customers for Jade, 50 of which have deployed and are running the Jade software. They include ITT, Hilton Hotels, Prime One, JP Morgan, Dupont and Saab. Vision employs around 80 people and is adding around five new recruits a month. Although it has its own application server product, Vision is more interested in concentrating on the business logic architecture side of its business, and is currently integrating that technology with the most promising of the emerging third party application servers, initially IBM Corp’s WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc’s WebLogic. Last month, it announced plans to integrate Jade with IBM’s DB2 Connect, MQ Series messaging and TXSeries transaction processing. By mid-1999, TXSeries will have become part of the Enterprise Edition of the WebSphere application server. The reason we built our own application server was because we needed to have a three- tier architecture, and no one company was dominant in the application server space in 1997, says Hewett. Butt application servers are becoming commoditized, and we will watch their progress. Much of Vision’s business is now associated with e-commerce, e-business and applications integration. It promises to announce more relationships over the coming months. Jade release 4, which runs on NT and all the major Unix variants, was launched last September, and the next major version should emerge around the same time this year.
