MONOSPHERE CLOSES $11 MILLION IN FUNDING TO ADDRESS GROWING STORAGE CAPACITY PLANNING MARKET DEMAND

New York sales office opens to expand national reach

Redwood City, Calif. – Oct. 25, 2006 – MonoSphere Inc., creators of storage capacity planning software, today announced it has closed $11 million in Series B funding.  Led by Intel Capital, this funding round also included additional investments from existing investors, ComVentures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  This new funding enabled MonoSphere to expand its national reach by opening a New York office.

“Since we announced Storage Horizon late last year, we have experienced tremendous customer and investor interest in helping enterprises manage and plan their exploding storage capacity growth,” said Ray Villeneuve, MonoSphere’s president and CEO.  “With so many companies working diligently to optimize their IT Capital Expenditures (CapEx) while improving service levels, Storage Horizon™ is ideally positioned to help organizations improve storage service levels and dramatically reduce storage CapEx.”

"As the amount of valuable content proliferates, companies struggle with where – and how – to adequately and efficiently store pertinent data and effectively utilize the existing storage infrastructure," said John Mascarenas, investment manager, Intel Capital. "We believe storage management is an urgent challenge in the marketplace and MonoSphere's software solutions help companies to address this need directly."

“Companies continue to grossly overspend on storage hardware with no real insight into where resources are actually needed or how best to deploy them,” said Michael Rolnick, partner at ComVentures. “MonoSphere enables these organizations to gain new visibility into their infrastructure and systematically plan and optimize their storage purchases and deployments.  Organizations who don’t take advantage of capacity planning applications are finding that their IT budgets are out of balance – too much is spent on storage hardware which leaves new IT initiatives under-funded.”

MonoSphere Storage Horizon software is used by Global 3000 companies to automate their storage capacity planning processes by providing a unified view of current and projected storage capacity usage.  These processes are aimed at reducing storage infrastructure spending by as much as 50 percent.  In today’s data intensive enterprise, despite shrinking unit costs, yearly storage spending is rising faster than overall IT budgets due to exponential growth of storage consumption by applications, compliance requirements, and data protection strategies.

Storage demand has been difficult to project, leaving administrators with no choice but to overprovision storage to avoid shortages.  Based on many petabytes of production data analyzed by MonoSphere, this has resulted in wasteful average storage utilization of 36 percent.  Storage Horizon helps IT organizations directly target this expensive, low-utilization problem, achieve greater value from their existing storage assets, and significantly reduce CapEx spending.

About MonoSphere
MonoSphere provides agent-less storage capacity planning software that enables Global 3000 companies to forecast, plan and optimize their storage capacity.  Providing unprecedented visibility into an organization’s storage resources, MonoSphere’s award-winning Storage Horizon software dramatically reduces spending on storage infrastructure.  Headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., the company is venture-backed by top-tier investors such as Intel Capital, ComVentures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Benchmark Capital.  More information can be found at www.monosphere.com.

About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel's venture capital organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$6 billion in nearly 1,000 companies in more than 40 countries. In that time, about 180 portfolio companies have been acquired by other companies and another 155 have gone public on various exchanges around the world. In 2005, Intel Capital invested about US$265 million in about 140 deals with approximately 60 percent of funds invested outside the United States. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.

About ComVentures
ComVentures is a leading venture capital firm that invests in mobile, Internet and enterprise applications and the underlying communication infrastructure. With $1.5 billion under management, ComVentures' partners have invested in more than 100 companies. Select current investments include: Adinfuse, Fabrik, MarketTools, Zantaz, Azul Systems, FyreStorm, OpSource, and Vyatta. Prior investments include: SiteSmith (acquired by MFN), Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM), Arbinet (NASDAQ: ARBX), Chromatis (acquired by Lucent Technologies), Digital Island (NASDAQ: ISLD), P-Cube (acquired by Cisco Systems), Intruvert Networks (acquired by McAfee), Kagoor Networks (acquired by Juniper Networks) and Monterey (acquired by Cisco Systems).

About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners combines extensive venture capital and operating experience to assist entrepreneurs in creating industry-leading technology companies. Lightspeed manages $1.3 billion of committed capital and focuses on seed and early stage information technology investments in the US, Asia and Israel. The firm’s partners have invested in more than 100 technology companies over the past two decades and have contributed to the success of market leaders including Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, Doubleclick, Ehealth, Galileo Technology, Growth Networks, Informatica, Kiva Software, LightLogic, Maker Communications, Metasolv, Phone.com, Quantum Effect Devices, Riverbed, Sirocco, Transmeta, Virsa and Waveset. For more information, please visit our website at www.lightspeedvp.com.

For more information:
Frank Kettenstock
650-595-3102
frank@monosphere.com