Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today named security industry expert Jim Melvin and veteran software investment banker Richard Vieira to its board of directors. Melvin and Vieira bring more than 30 years of combined IT systems and startup experience to Fortisphere’s board.

“Enterprises are embracing the cost and efficiency gains made possible through virtualization, but are hampered today by numerous security threats and compliance risks,” said Jim Melvin, vice president of marketing and security solutions at RSA, The Security Division of EMC. “I’m looking forward to working with the Fortisphere management team as the company strives to help organizations accelerate secure virtualization adoption by better managing their virtual machine environments.”

“Managing virtualized environments with operations and security in mind is the only way to ensure growth that transcends organizational boundaries. Fortisphere's technology is fulfilling a critical enterprise need in the rapidly emerging VM lifecycle management market,” said Richard Vieira. “I look forward to assisting Mike and his team as the company looks to exploit this great market opportunity.”

Michael Harper, president and CEO, Fortisphere added: “It’s great to have Jim and Richard as board members. Their collective expertise will prove extremely valuable as we rapidly scale the company to meet market demand.”

About Jim Melvin

A security industry veteran, Melvin is the vice president of marketing and security solutions at RSA, The Security Division of EMC. He brings a wealth of experience in the areas of corporate strategy, go to market planning and distribution partnerships. These experiences span from early stage startups to some of the world’s largest and most successful technology vendors.

Prior to its acquisition by RSA, Melvin served as executive vice president of marketing and business development at Network Intelligence, a leader in transforming enterprise-wide data into automated compliance and security information. He has also held CEO and marketing leadership positions at Mazu Networks, Sightpath and then Cisco, after its acquisition of Sightpath in 2000.

About Richard Vieira

A 16-year veteran in providing corporate finance and merger and acquisition advisory, Vieira was most recently a managing director of Jefferies & Co.’s Technology Investment Banking Group, one of the largest banking teams dedicated to information technology, communications and digital media businesses. At Jefferies & Co., Vieira was responsible for steering the software coverage and corporate finance efforts and focused on advising clients in the software and infrastructure markets.

Vieira has accomplished numerous advisory and financing transactions completing more than $8B in value involving leading global technology vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Symantec and EMC. He has also led several notable merger and acquisition transactions including the acquisition of Exstream Software by American Capital for $620M; the acquisition of Authorize.Net out of InfoSpace by Lightbridge and the eventual merger of Authorize.Net into CyberSource; the acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat; the acquisition of Sleepycat Software by Oracle; the acquisition of Brontes by 3M; the acquisition of AppIQ by Hewlett Packard; the acquisition of Relicore by Symantec, amongst many others. He also led the firm’s role in several public software financings, including the recent IPOs and follow-on financings of Vistaprint, InnerWorkings, Monotype Imaging and PROS Holdings.