Business analytics and data warehousing database developer Greenplum landed $27 million and key strategic partners in a Series C financing round led by Meritech Capital Partners of Palo Alto, Calif.

The backers included Mountain View, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems Inc. and Germany's SAP Ventures as new investors. The deal includes Greenplum's previous investors Mission Ventures of San Diego, Sierra Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif., Dawntreader Ventures of New York, EDF Ventures of Ann Arbor, Mich. and Hudson Ventures of New York.

The round brings the total investment in the San Mateo, Calif.-based company to $74 million and is expected to take the five-year-old company to positive cash flow in 2009.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said the funding will allow it to tighten ties to Sun, which packages its hardware with Greenplum's software-only products to compete with proprietary business intelligence hardware appliances, including those from Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp.'s Teradata division and Framingham, Mass.-based Netezza Corp.

Greenplum CEO Bill Cook said in an interview the new investment will accelerate Greenplum's sales and marketing plan after beating initial goals since launching full commercial sales a year ago. The company sells its products directly, and through channel partners including systems integrators and increasingly, value-added hardware resellers.

"We had not planned on raising this round so soon, but we hit all our yearly goals mid-year, and the Sun relationship is going well, so we felt it was important to accelerate growth," Cook said. "We had expected to start fundraising around this time, but we started earlier and Meritech was very aggressive in dealing with us."

Greenplum did not disclose terms of the investment, but Cook said the deal was priced at a significant increase to the company's $15 million B round led by Sierra Ventures.

Greenplum makes software that runs on Linux or Sun's Solaris operating system and runs dedicated storage and server hardware that applies business analytics tools to derive intelligence through data warehousing and mining. Greenplum's product is designed to quickly sift through extremely large databases to produce useful, real-time results, which, for example, can be used to produce highly targeted marketing campaigns or to catch errors in billing information.

Cook, who joined the company in November 2006 from Sun, said he was initially attracted to the growth in the business analytics market, and Greenplum's more open, software-only approach.

"There is a really big market emerging for data warehousing and analytics, and a change in how companies are thinking about using data," he said. "I was at Sun and used to open systems, and liked the way Greenplum approached the market as opposed to more mainframe-like companies like Teradata."

Rob Ward, a managing director with Meritech, said Greenplum has already generated strong sales in the market and he saw an opportunity to accelerate growth with the new investment. Cook said the company is focusing on building a direct sales force in addition to leveraging its relationship with Sun, and to build other channels.

He said the company also is working with SAP to determine how it will work with the giant enterprise resource planning software maker. He said the company was in discussions with SAP before the German company announced in October its plan to acquire French analytics tool developer Business Objects SA.

"Greenplum is a strong fit for our portfolio,'' said Ward. ``Meritech invests in companies with proven and differentiated technology, rapidly growing revenue and seasoned management teams."

Greenplum did not use an outside financial adviser in putting the round together, and had legal work on the deal from Steve Venuto of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in Menlo Park.