Colubris raises $14 million

Good news for WLAN optimized switching pioneer Colubris Networks: The company has just raised $14 million in new funding. All current Colubris investors have taken part in the new round, among them Prism VentureWorks, GrandBanks Capital, DCM--Doll Capital Management, Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, The Telecommunications Development Fund and The Business Development Bank of Canada.

This is not only an important milestone for a company, but also a vindication of a specific approach to WLAN architecture. Colubris currently offers one of the industry's first optimized WLAN switching system, which is a comprehensive infrastructure allowing enterprises to deliver scalable mobile voice, data and video applications. The company claims it actually pioneered this new WLAN category of optimized switching, which couples distributed intelligence with centralized control and management for the purpose of more effectively addressing the scalability, performance and QoS limitations inherent in first generation centralized WLAN switch architectures. Analysts say that enterprises will run into these limits as VoWLAN applications become widespread and 802.11n products become more readily available.

Alcatel has selected Colubris solutions for its (Alcatel's) deployment in nationwide fixed-mobile convergence applications, and the solution is currently in trials with several tier 1 carriers around the globe. As we wrote two weeks ago, Trapeze, too, has now adopted this optimized switching approach to WLAN architecture.

For more on Colubris fund raising round:
- see the company's news release