rPath® today announced that the company has closed a $10M round of venture financing. The Series C round was led by rPath’s existing backers, General Catalyst, North Bridge Venture Partners and Wakefield Group. The company plans to use this new capital to increase its leadership in enabling cloud computing.

Merrill Lynch’s recent research note titled, “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at Stake,” cites cloud computing has the potential to shower billions in revenues on companies that embrace it. According to Merrill Lynch, the burgeoning technology concept is seen as a $160-billion addressable market opportunity, including $95-billion in business and productivity applications, and another $65-billion in online advertising.

“As the demand for cloud computing continues to explode, rPath is in a unique position to drive adoption as the fastest and most scalable approach for delivering applications to cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Citrix’s XenServer, and VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure,” said Billy Marshall, rPath founder and CEO.

Cloud computing is fully enabled by virtualization technology (hypervisors) and virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is an application that is optimized for virtual environments -- whether an internal cluster of systems or an external cloud of computers such as Amazon’s EC2. In a cloud computing environment, a virtual appliance can be instantly provisioned and decommissioned as needed, without complex configuration of the operating environment.

Numerous Customer Wins

Since the beginning of 2008, rPath has seen a surge of interest in its technology resulting in an increase of over 100% in new customers, including 3SP, Avinity Systems, CERN, Cynapse, Department of Energy, DigitalStakeout, Firescope, VIP Tone and Webalo.

“The flexibility of the rPath Appliance Platform has allowed us to deliver a high performance and highly secure appliance by including only the operating system components required by our application,” said Seth Bruder, chief technology officer for Webalo. “Whereas this customization process is usually long and arduous, with rPath we were able to get what we wanted in a matter of weeks.”