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Followap Completes Series C Round of Financing Led by Sequoia Capital; Releases Presence Platform for Next Generation IMS Networks.


MENLO PARK Menlo Park.

1 Residential city (1990 pop. 28,040), San Mateo co., W Calif.; inc. 1874. Electronic equipment and aerospace products are manufactured in the city. Menlo College and a Stanford Univ. research institute are there.

2 Uninc.
, Calif. & LONDON -- Followap, the leading provider of carrier-class Presence and IM solutions, today announced the release of its iFollow Presence Platform for next generation networks, as well as the closing of Series C financing led by Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The firm's partners include Don Valentine, Pierre Lamond, Michael Moritz, Doug Leone, Mike Goguen, Mark Stevens, Jim Goetz, Sameer Gandhi, Roelof Botha, and Mark Kvamme. . The investment underscores the significant business opportunity involved in presence-enabling communication networks.

Presence enables communicating parties to be aware of each other's availability and connectivity status. Presence is the key enabler behind extremely popular real-time communication services that customers will have experienced through their use of existing products, primarily through Internet messenger environments. By presence enabling an increasing range of communication services, such as voice, messaging and other multimedia applications, customers will be able to extend the existing behavior across a wide range of converged networks The integration of the telephone system with IP-based data networks. See softswitch.

(networking) converged network - A single network that can carry voice, video and data.
.

The new release of the iFollow Presence Platform is designed to operate over IMS (1) See IP Multimedia Subsystem.

(2) (Information Management System) An early IBM hierarchical DBMS for IBM mainframes. IMS was widely implemented throughout the 1970s under MVS and continues to be used under z/OS.
 (IP Multimedia Subsystem An integrated network for telecommunications carriers that uses the IP protocol as its foundation for packetized voice, video and data. Supporting voice over IP (VoIP) in all its flavors (SIP, H.323, MGCP, etc. ) core networks. Followap has already integrated its iFollow Presence Platform with IMS core networks from three leading Network Equipment Providers, creating an off-the-shelf, SIP-based Presence solution that also functions as a Group Management Server. The platform supports all Presence and IM standard protocols of 2G, 2.5G and 3G generation networks, including Wireless Village, SIP/SIMPLE, PAM and XMPP (EXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) An XML-based protocol for real time communications, originally developed by Jeremie Miller in 1998 for the Jabber instant messaging system. . Followap is spearheading Presence and IM standardization efforts.

"Presence information is a universal service enabler, upgrading existing services and creating new service opportunities across fixed, mobile, enterprise, cable and other types of networks. The benefits and revenue potential Presence brings are significant and present a huge opportunity, which is only now beginning to reveal itself," said Haim Sadger, Sequoia Capital's Board of Directors member at Followap.

The capital raised in this round will be invested in further increasing Followap's market leadership in presence-enabling mobile and converging IP-based networks. Existing investors including Carmel Ventures, Star Ventures, ICTech and Koor CVC See CSC.  also participated in this round of financing.

"This investment is a vote of confidence in the future of Presence, and will enable us to secure our lead in the market and realize the potential of Presence in converged networks," said Dotan Volach, Followap's CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. . "Sequoia Capital's unparalleled experience in accelerating high-growth companies and in opening up untapped markets, will greatly contribute to Followap's growth and success."

"We are excited to welcome Sequoia Capital, a firm with a most impressive track record of identifying and backing major industry trends, as a new investor in Followap," said Rina Shainski, General Partner of Carmel Ventures, the lead investor of the previous round in the company.

About Followap Inc.

Followap is the leading provider of Presence and IM solutions to the telecommunications industry. Pioneering this field, Followap's customer base consists today of over 15 network operators, including the Vodafone Group of operators. Followap has recently launched presence infrastructure and services at Turkcell. Its Presence Platform enables operators to establish advanced Presence enhanced services, whilst also creating the infrastructure for next-generation networks. Followap's Presence Platform is part of HP's Service Delivery Platform.

For additional information please visit Followap's Web site at www.followap.com

About Sequoia Capital

Since 1972, Sequoia Capital has provided startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs," Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with the entrepreneurs behind Apple Computer, Cisco Systems “Cisco” redirects here. For other uses, see Cisco (disambiguation).
Cisco System,Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO, HKSE: 4333 ) is an American multinational corporation with 54,000 employees and annual revenue of US $28.48 billion as of 2006.
, Electronic Arts, Google, Network Appliance (1) A specialized device for use on a network. For example, Web servers, cache servers and file servers can be implemented as general-purpose computers with the appropriate software or as network appliances, which are computers dedicated to a single function and cannot do anything , Oracle, PayPal (eBay), Vitesse Semiconductor and Yahoo!, to name a few. The companies funded by Sequoia Capital now account for about 10 percent of the value of NASDAQ NASDAQ
 in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations

U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on
. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Business Wire
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2005, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Publication:Business Wire
Date:Jun 2, 2005
Words:585
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