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As we studied the cloud infrastructure investment opportunity last year, we realized in speaking with our Asian telecommunications carrier limited partners and network that the market had reached a tipping point where service providers were budgeting significant dollars for the development and build out of cloud infrastructures in 2011 and beyond.

By speaking to our partners such as Korea Telecom and NTT, and linking them to potential cloud partners and vendors along the entire cloud value chain, we gained a good understanding of the business and technical requirements to operate a carrier-grade cloud service. As we met with various companies that provide technology solutions, it was clear that storage was a major cost element for our carrier partners if they were to compete with the Amazon's of the world.

We concluded that there was a significant, discrete opportunity in storage for a start-up to deliver low cost, scalable and open solutions to this market and believed Nexenta to be the leader in the emerging space.  In addition to our investment, one of our strategic investors also made a co-investment with us and has engaged in a business deal with the company.

Nexenta develops NexentaStor™, an OpenStorage enterprise class hardware independent storage solution, and NexentaCore, an open source operating system that combines the high performance and reliability of OpenSolaris with the ease-of-use and breadth of applications of Linux.  Nexenta's software virtualizes data-storage systems, and the software can run on basic server systems from any hardware vendor. That makes Nexenta a competitor to both storage behemoths such as EMC, which sells hardware-software systems, and providers of on-demand computing resources such as Amazon.