Akimbi Systems

About Akimbi Systems

Akimbi Systems, established in 2004, specialized in infrastructure management services for software development and testing organizations. The company was founded by James Phillips, who also served as its CEO. Akimbi provided a solution to automate and streamline the application development lifecycle, addressing the costly and time-consuming process of manually configuring server environments for testing.

The company's flagship product, Akimbi Slingshot, leveraged virtual machine technology to enable the rapid capture, storage, and restoration of complex software and hardware configurations. This allowed software developers and quality assurance engineers to create a library of server environments that could be deployed on-demand for testing new applications. Slingshot operated on top of virtual machine software from providers like VMware and Microsoft and integrated with application lifecycle management tools from companies such as Mercury Interactive and IBM/Rational through a SOAP interface. The core benefit was a significant reduction in the manual labor required for setting up test labs, with claims of cutting associated development costs by up to 50 percent.

Akimbi Systems' business model was centered on selling its Slingshot Virtual Lab Automation System to organizations engaged in software development. The company secured Series A funding of $3.44 million in December 2004, followed by a Series B round in November 2005. Its trajectory culminated in an acquisition by VMware in June 2006 for $47.3 million, marking a strategic move for VMware to incorporate Akimbi's lab management and automation capabilities into its portfolio.