Feb, 2002 : CenterRun Enters Market with Sequoia Funding

📅 February 22, 2002 - Backed by Sequoia Capital, CenterRun, Inc. (centerrun.com) has announced its company launch. CenterRun raised $11 million in early 2001 from Sequoia Capital and Lighthouse Capital Partners.

The company's board of directors includes Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital,John Dillon, CEO of diCarta, former CEO of Hyperion Solutions andsalesforce.com, Tom Shanahan, former CFO of Agile Software, and AarefHilaly, president, CEO and co-founder of CenterRun. The company's firstproduct, to be announced soon, automates the configuration and deployment ofWeb applications in enterprise data centers from a central console.
"Businesses must bring their operations to the Web to compete in today'sglobal market," said Aaref Hilaly, president, CEO and co-founder, CenterRun."As critical, customer-facing operations move online, data centers arefeeling increased pressure from management to deploy more applicationsfaster with no margin for error. CenterRun protects the revenue generatingpotential of the data center by reducing downtime due to maintenance andfailures, optimizing resources and ultimately making the data center moreresponsive to the business so that Web applications better support corporateobjectives."
The enterprise systems management software market was $13.5 billion in 2001and is projected to grow 77% to $23.9 billion in 2005, according to IDC. Themarket that CenterRun pursues, systems management software tied to Internet,e-commerce, or overall Web-based applications, will grow at a compoundannual growth rate of 63% from $160 million in 1998 to $2 billion in 2003.
"A good deal of company downtime is caused by configuration error during thedeployment process, and companies are measuring downtime in revenue lost perhour or even minute," said Jasmine Noel, director, systems and applicationsmanagement, Hurwitz Group. "We see a large market opportunity for vendorswho can help enterprises reduce errors and save time and money by improvingand automating the error-prone process of deploying, changing and upgradingWeb applications."
CenterRun was founded in June 2000 by Aaref Hilaly, Basil Hashem and MichaelSchroepfer. In previous roles working closely with enterprise data centers,each became aware of an increasing problem in the area of Web applicationconfiguration and deployment. Their research and meetings with data centerprofessionals confirmed that existing tools did not address the day-to-dayneeds of operations personnel. Together they set out to build a softwarecompany to solve the problem.
CenterRun's product, to be announced in the next few weeks, automates theconfiguration and deployment of Web applications in enterprise data centersfrom a central console. The product's approach goes beyond distributingfiles across a network; it understands the variety of components thatcomprise Web applications and their inter- dependencies to make end-to-endautomation of configuration and deployment possible, the company says. As aresult, CenterRun makes configuring and deploying Web applications fasterand more reliable. The product is currently being implemented in selectGlobal 2000 customers. It initially supports the Sun Solaris, IBM AIX andMicrosoft Windows platforms. CenterRun will be publicly previewed at BEAeWorld, Feb. 24-27, 2002 in San Diego, Calif.