ACADEMIA

Solera Networks announced that it has secured $20 million in Series D financing led by Intel Capital. Intel Capital is joined by existing investors Allegis Capital, Signal Peak Ventures and Trident Capital. The new funds will help support the company's rapid growth by further expanding global sales, marketing and product development initiatives.

"With increasingly large amounts of data crossing corporate networks, organizations must balance advanced threat prevention with an aggressive and proactive response system to be fully prepared when an inevitable breach occurs. We see companies continuing to realize that real-time, intelligent incident response is now an essential component of their security strategy," said Sean Cunningham, Intel Capital Investment Director. "Solera Networks delivers a scalable, high-performance solution that addresses these challenges and is the only independent platform capable of broad integration. We are very optimistic about where Solera is headed."

Solera's Series D financing round follows a year of tremendous momentum -- with domestic and international growth exceeding 100% in 2011. Its award-winning DeepSee platform continues to redefine rapid and proactive threat response using advanced Deep Packet Inspection capabilities to capture, index and classify all network traffic in real-time. Moreover, Solera delivers the industry's most scalable, high-performance solution, and is the only independent platform capable of broad integration with the industry's best-in-class security tools. The addition of Intel Capital and its expertise with cutting-edge processor, networking, and storage technologies is expected to fuel even more advanced capabilities in future product releases.

"Malware entering the network and key intellectual property leaving are top-of-mind for every Chief Information Security Officer, and for Solera Networks. We're providing complete visibility into what's happening on the network, including all threats coming in and all data going out, allowing organizations to shut down breaches before they result in widespread loss," said Steve Shillingford, President and CEO of Solera Networks. "We're seeing broad adoption of our full-fidelity 'camera for your network' technology, providing CISOs and CEOs the added assurance that all breaches are contained, maintaining our customers' reputation and mitigating their financial risk."

Analyst Andrew Hay of 451 Research said, "For comprehensive threat protection, organizations need complete network visibility; this, coupled with advanced analytics and intelligence, will enable businesses to respond faster to security threats. Solera's focus in this area, combined with growing market awareness and interest in network and security visibility, will likely help propel the company's growth in 2012 and beyond."

Benefits of Advanced Security Response Solera leverages its patented DeepSee platform to collect, index and classify all network traffic (including cloud and mobile) in real-time, delivering a complete picture of what's happening for any security event, including advanced persistent threats (APTs). Solera gives CISOs answers to the most important questions, such as: "What, precisely, is going on and where? What has been affected or lost? Does a problem still exist somewhere else within the network?" Solera tells security professionals what to look for, enabling them to get ahead of risk before any damage is done.

Most importantly for business leaders, Solera enables organizations to mitigate the impact of threats by enabling the most rapid and proactive response possible. In the event of malware or a breach, security teams can quickly get to the bottom of issues, contain and remediate them, and report to all key constituents in short order -- heading off financial liability, legal, customer and brand issues, and reputation or compliance implications.