Virtual server management company Embotics is growing up and out.

The Ottawa-based firm, which offers solutions to manage and track virtual servers, recently announced the opening of its U.S. office in Charlotte, N.C. along with the launch of the second release of its flagship V-Commander product.

The announcements are a mark of the company's progress since it came out of stealth mode in the second half of 2007, with rapid growth and strong partnerships with global companies such as Citrix and Microsoft occurring in the interim period.

"The market acceptance is certainly there, and competitors are copying what we're doing but we're keeping ahead of them," said David Lynch, Embotics's vice-president of marketing. "Business is growing with the increase of the virtual environment, and while the number of contracts that we've started with has been small, the incremental licences are coming in now."

Mr. Lynch said the company has been working with clients such as AMD and Alcatel-Lucent with large environments of around 80 hosts and between 10 to 20 virtual machines per host, and the interest has been very strong for the beta version of V-Commander 2.0, which selected users began testing out in May.

The new release is an update to the version which Embotics has been installing and selling since January, and offers new functions including the ability to analyze virtual machines in terms of cost in order to better clean up virtual environments and reclaim resources used by the virtual servers, and policy triggers to prevent virtual servers from running in appropriate areas.

Mr. Lynch said the feedback V-Commander 2.0 has been getting has been very positive, with beta customers even deploying the solution in production because of its stability, and business has been strong despite the competition from U.S. firms, which is why it's currently a good time to open a U.S. office.

"It's interesting for a Canadian company from Ottawa to get very good pickup from the industry," he said. "Usually there's a slight disadvantage in North American sales because the competition tends to be in America, but it doesn't seem to matter for us. It's gratifying to get through the knothole and take advantage of the market out there."

Mr. Lynch said the company has doubled its development staff numbers since it first started out, and the plan is to grow even more by the end of the year – Embotics currently has 45 staff in total, with 43 employees in Ottawa, and the goal is to reach 60 staff by the end of 2008.

Embotics is also moving rapidly on its product plans, with the third version of V-Commander set to be launched once Microsoft comes out with its System Centre Virtual Machine Manager product, for which Embotics is including support.

Mr. Lynch said the company isn't profitable yet but it could be by next year if it chose, although it's looking instead to expand to match the growth curve of the virtualization market.

"We have aggressive starting plans here; we're building our marketing organization and starting up inside sales in Ottawa and beefing up our support organization," he said.

To find out more about Embotics and what V-Commander does, click Embotics 'Commander'-ing the market'.