Automation Provider BladeLogic Plans IPO

Waltham, Mass. automation software provider BladeLogic Inc. says it is planning an initial public offering after five years of strong growth, driven by underlying trends in the data center industry. Chief Executive Dev Ittycheria told Mass Hi-Tech that BladeLogic has experienced compound annual growth rate of 250 percent since being founded in 2001, with a customer list that includes Time Warner Inc. and Walmart.com.

Ittycheria says that growth is driven by trends in data center management, as enterprises are using more servers and updating them more frequently. BladeLogic's data center management software makes it easier to deploy patches across large networks of servers, and detect misconfigured machines that could present operational or security problems.

BladeLogic says it opened a development facility in India last year to help the company offset the shortage of software engineers in New England. The company employs 180 workers, but plans to increase that to at least 230 by the end of the year, Ittycheria said, and will soon relocate its headquarters to Lexington, Mass.

The company, which has raised $29 million in venture capital funding, has been the subject of takeover talk. Some of that chatter has focused on EMC, which bought virtualization software specialist VMWare.

"I won't comment on anything specific to EMC, but we have had discussions with just about every major player in the industry, whether with respect to some sort of partnership or a merger or acquisition," Ittycheria said in a January interview.