Centrify, which puts Active Directory-based auditing, access control and identity management on non-Microsoft platforms, has gotten a $15 million third round, bringing its total financing to $36 million. The round was reportedly oversubscribed; the company was only looking for $11 million-$13 million. Centrify wants the money to expand its direct and indirect domestic and international sales. It also wants to develop its software further. Sigma Partners led the round, which get its managing director, former Cisco CIO Peter Solvik, a board seat. Existing backers Mayfield, Accel and Invesco also participated. Centrify now claims 10 of the Fortune 50 among its 200 accounts.

Tom Kemp is President and Chief Executive Officer at Centrify, where he is driving the strategic direction of the company. Previously he was Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, a leading venture capital firm. Kemp was a co-founder of NetIQ and in his last position there served as Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development. Other positions held by Kemp in his nearly eight-year tenure at NetIQ included Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Performance and Availability Management business unit; Senior Vice President of Products; and Vice President of Marketing. Prior to NetIQ Kemp held various management, technical and marketing roles at Compuware Corporation, EcoSystems Software, and Oracle Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and in history from the University of Michigan.

In his April 20, 2007 dated company blog Tom Kemp writes: "On April 18 we announced another major company milestone: the raising of $15 million in Series C funding. To date, Centrify has raised $36 million in venture funding from some of the leading venture capitalists in the world. This makes Centrify the most well funded company focused on delivering cross-platform interoperability and integration of Windows systems with non-Microsoft platforms such as Linux, and I believe it makes us the most well funded identity and access management software vendor in the market since Oblix.

As was the case with our prior round of funding, we are pleased this was a nice "up" round, thus representing increased value that we are generating with investors. New investor Sigma Partners joined existing investors Mayfield Fund, Accel Partners and INVESCO Private Capital in this round. The funding round was over-subscribed, and we were fortunate enough to be able to select from multiple term sheets.

One of the questions I was asked most frequently by reporters who wrote about this announcement (articles appeared in TheDeal, Private Equity Week, VentureBeat, and the San Jose Business Journal for example) involved the major company accomplishments since we raised our last round of financing in July of 2005, a year and three quarters ago. To my mind the answer is four-fold:

• Great customer traction — growing from a few dozen to 200 customers, including 10 of the Fortune 50.
• Great sales traction — growing proportionally to our growth in customers.
• Great initial partner traction — building out an initial set of channel and OEM partners.
• Great product expansion — expanding our DirectControl solution to cover more OSes (e.g. first and only to do Group Policies for the Mac) and applications (DB2, Oracle, SAP, etc.) and entering a new market with our DirectAudit solution, thereby now allowing us to offer the broadest suite of Active Directory-centric identity and access management solutions for UNIX/Linux environments. "