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Applied Identity Completes $8 Million Venture Financing Round Led by Bay Partners and Sigma PartnersSAN FRANCISCO --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 13, 2005 -- Applied Identity (www.appliedidentity.com) today announced it has completed an $8 million first round of institutional venture financing from Bay Partners and Sigma Partners. The funds will be used to grow the sales and marketing organizations, develop international distribution, and expand development efforts. Bob Williams of Bay, and Pete Solvik of Sigma, have also joined Applied Identity's board of directors. Applied Identity addresses the problems of enterprise network resource access control and identity management. The Applied Identity Identiforce(TM) policy enforcement gateway appliance works with a customer's existing authentication and directory services to cloak all network resources except those explicitly allowed to any user or group. If a resource can't be seen or accessed, it cannot be compromised. Unauthorized access, worm propagation, and malicious data manipulation are all prevented by the Applied Identity solution. Existing approaches rely on physical segmentation and enforcement by network addresses. In contrast, the Identiforce platform binds user identity to network resource usage independent of location, platform, or connection type. Instead of a gauntlet of expensive internal firewalls, a single Identiforce appliance can address the security needs of even large organizations in an elegant and extremely cost effective manner. "Applied Identity has developed a breakthrough solution to a huge problem nearly every enterprise faces today--how to get highly granular access control and policy enforcement without adding significant cost and overhead to the corporate network," said Bob Williams of Bay Partners. "Because Applied Identity's implementation is simple to deploy, integrates with Microsoft's Active Directory or any LDAP-compliant solution, and requires no client-side interaction, Applied Identity is the most compatible and cost effective solution available." "As a former CIO of a Fortune 100 company, I believe the market for a robust identity enforcement solution is enormous," said Pete Solvik of Sigma Partners. "Most companies have significant projects underway for identity management, directory migration, risk mitigation, and regulatory compliance. Applied Identity's solution adds tremendous value to each of these business initiatives by providing granular network segmentation, enforcement of policy at the network level, and levels of auditing and event forensics not possible with existing solutions." "We're delighted to partner with Bay and Sigma, two of the most effective company builders in the tier one VC community," said Brian Nugent, president and CEO of Applied Identity. "Bob and Pete both have terrific operational backgrounds. Bob's deep security venture expertise, combined with Pete's 'buy-side' orientation, will help the company enormously moving forward." About Applied Identity Applied Identity develops scalable, identity-based solutions for securing enterprise networks. Applied Identity's Identiforce(TM) gateway appliance creates individual security domains for each user and delivers infinitely fine-grained identity and access enforcement. Applied Identity's products are now deployed in Fortune 100 companies and large government agencies across the US, and the company is expanding into international markets. About Bay Partners Bay Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm active in fundamental technology investing. Bay has funded over 250 companies since 1976. The firm's most important differentiator is its depth and breadth of operational expertise -- spanning technology, sales, marketing, business development, and financial, legal and general management. Bay Partners closed its 10th fund with committed capital of $375 million and manages over $1 billion dollars in total. Bay Partners' portfolio successes include Exodus Communications, Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA), Digital Island, Brocade Communications (NASDAQ:BRCD), Web Logic (NASDAQ: BEAS) and Sonic Wall (NASDAQ:SNWL). On the web Bay can be found at www.baypartners.com. About Sigma Partners Sigma Partners, a high technology venture capital firm with over a billion dollars under management, helps entrepreneurs transform ideas into substantial, profitable businesses. Sigma's partners have experience as successful CEOs, entrepreneurs and technologists. Their deep operating and technical insight helps build teams and strategies that produce sustainable value and successful outcomes. Sigma tends towards early stage investments because of the value that they can bring to the process of building teams, strategies and markets. Some of the many successful Sigma Partners investments over their 20 year history include Cascade Communications, Clarify, Electronic Arts, GeoTel, Internet Security Systems, Octel, MIPS, Novellus, Verifone, Vignette and Wellfleet. www.sigmapartners.com. |
