In this economy, a $25 million round of investment funding isn't very common, yet that is just what video storage solutions company Pivot3 announced last week. Flipping back through the business pages in our industry, this is the sort of massive industry investment that only happens about once a year. In 2009, it was iControl Networks, a company focused on home systems management (security, heating, cooling, and more); iControl landed $23 million in July 2009. A year earlier, in July 2008, the big investment recipient was Milestone Systems. The "open platform" IP video management company received $27 million in funding from Index Ventures in that round, but Pivot3 also received $24 million that year in their "C" funding. It was more common to see investments of not quite half of those amounts. VideoIQ picked up $10 million in 2008, and VidSys picked up $10 million the previous year.

"The last big funding round of this magnitude [in the video surveillance space] was Milestone Systems," explained Lee Caswell, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Pivot3. "The money is going into open system solutions, and of course, Milestone is a perfect example of that. It looks like the IT market, where the money stopped going to proprietary companies and went [instead] to companies that specialize in the open systems like the software and infrastructure."

Indeed, the money tends to be landing directly in the laps of companies that can work with others. For Pivot3, their storage solutions work with a number of video surveillance management engines. Likewise, iControl's solutions tie together disparate systems, and the investors in iControl demonstrated the diversity of applications for the company's technology, with monies coming from ADT, GE and Cisco. VidSys, of course, is a physical security information management company whose technology is designed to integrate a variety of sensors and security information data feeds -- everything from access control to video surveillance to fire alarms.

While Pivot3 announced funding number was at $25 million, the funding round could finalize at $30 million since there are other investors actively looking, according to Caswell. He said he has confidence in Pivot3's placement in the industry, and says it helps that Pivot3 isn't just another storage vendor selling racked drive space.