Phurnace Software announced that it has completed its $5 million Series A financing, led by S3 Ventures, a Texas-based venture capital firm. Previous investors, including DFJ Mercury, also participated in the financing. The capital will be used by Phurnace to expand sales, marketing and development activities for its patent-pending deployment automation products.

We first saw Phurnace at Innotech at the Beta Summit last year, and the company officially launched back in November. The company provides IT operations staff with data center automation tools to dramatically reduce application deployment times, decrease configuration errors, lower costs and enable more efficient enterprise Java deployments. The company’s flagship product, Phurnace Deliver™, is used by some of the country’s largest companies in multiple vertical markets. It supports deployments and automated configurations on the leading web application server platforms, including IBM WebSphere®, BEA WebLogic® and RedHat JBoss™. The company has also recently announced automated deployment support for IBM WebSphere® Portal.

“S3 invests in companies with innovative technology, a compelling measurable value proposition and significant customer traction,” said Brian R. Smith, Managing Director at S3 Ventures. He continued, “Phurnace’s products address a clear need in the marketplace, as evidenced by its use among Fortune 500 companies, and we are looking forward to helping them expand their rapidly growing business.”

“The fit was strong between Phurnace and S3 Ventures because we both see how data center automation is top-of-mind in enterprise IT departments. S3 sees the large investment opportunity in the data center and Phurnace has created a powerful solution to reduce headaches and costs there,” stated Larry Warnock, President and CEO of Phurnace Software. He continued, “Companies continue to invest inordinate amounts of time and effort into scripts and manual processes where automation is a much better approach. The value of using Phurnace Deliver™ can be seen immediately after its installation.”

System administrators and Java developers use Phurnace’s technology to reduce errors, save time and eliminate the need for hard-to-maintain scripting while configuring web application servers. The use of Phurnace software results in a significantly more efficient deployment process which can be shortened from weeks to minutes. The agent-less architecture of Phurnace Deliver™ fits into companies’ existing data center processes and the command line interface (CLI) option allows for direct integration to software build and operation toolsets such as HP Server Automation®, IBM Rational®, IBM Tivoli® and BMC BladeLogic™.