Virtual machine management software maker Fortisphere Monday announced it had closed $10 million in Series A venture capital funding.

Fairhaven Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners co-led the round of funding for the Glenwood, Md., company founded in October 2006. Fortisphere says it will put the additional capital toward furthering product development, growing its sales team and gaining visibility in the market. The company's Virtual Essentials suite of applications can identify, track, report on and manage virtual machines, the company says, which helps companies control and secure their virtual environments over the entire life cycle of virtual machines.

Quoting IDC's projection that the server virtualization market will reach $11.7 billion over the next four years and that about half of the world's 4.2 million servers will be virtualized, Paul Ciriello, managing partner, Fairhaven Capital Partners, said in a statement that Fortisphere is addressing a growing pain point in today's companies.

"While this dramatic growth has resulted in cost and operational gains for companies, it has also triggered a need for data center management tools purpose-built for virtualized environments. Fortisphere fills this urgent market need by providing a unique means for organizations to more efficiently manage their virtual machine deployments," Ciriello said.

Headed up by CEO and President Michael Harper and CTO John Suit, also the principal founder, Fortisphere couples years of industry experience with one of today's hotter technology areas, investors say. Harper formerly held leadership positions on server virtualization teams at IBM and USinternetworking, while Suit co-founded SilentRunner, whose technology CA acquired in 2003 to add traffic-monitoring and packet-analysis capabilities to its Unicenter management software line.

"Fortisphere has assembled an accomplished management team of technology industry veterans,” said Dave Fachetti, managing director, Globespan Capital Partners, in a statement.

Fortisphere faces competition from fellow start-up vendors such as Virtugo Software, Vizioncore, and Veeam that are building their businesses on managing virtual environments. Such start-ups will also face competition as hypervisor providers such as VMware and Microsoft look to differentiate themselves with advanced virtual machine management capabilities.