Infrastructure Renaissance

We often get asked by bleary eyed investors whether there is any "There There" in the infrastructure space as they wondered whether infrastructure companies had enough financial potential to justify a big enough part of their portfolios. During the good old days of the bubble in the late 90's, infrastructure companies were "hot hot hot" since they were the arms dealers enabling the Dot Com build-out, but today, there aren't as many venture folks specializing in infrastructure. We'd of course point out important financially successful infrastructure sectors like anti-spam companies (which so far have generated over $2.2B in liquidity transactions) and of course this year we've seen infrastructure companies like Riverbed and Sourcefire complete successful IPOs. Now with VMware's grand slam yesterday maybe we don't have to have these discussions about the financial viability of the infrastructure sector anymore.