It's nice to have as one of your customers a company that executed the most successful technology IPO of the year.

That's the sweet spot occupied right now by Blue Lane Technologies, which sells its security appliance to VMWare, the EMC Corp. unit that rode the booming virtualization wave to a monster stock offering in August. 

Having a marquee customer adds to the accolades that Blue Lane has collected, including several awards for best products at industry trade shows and being named one of the top 100 private companies by AlwaysOn -- for two straight years.

Large enterprises are adopting virtualization to boost the efficiency of their servers, effectively shifting the data center from a hardware-centric to a software-centric environment,  Blue Lane VP of Marketing Greg Ness tells Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco in this interview.

That's creating a new operating system layer that needs to be protected from security threats.

See our previous story on virtualization here.

Rather than try an build "the Great Wall of China" around the virtualization layer by keeping out all traffic, Blue Lane takes an approach that has a lighter impact on data center traffic, Ness says.

"It's more like a Khyber Pass approach," says Ness, where the company looks down into the protocol layer of application server traffic to detect security vulnerabilities and prevent attacks. "We keep availability high."

Blue Lane has raised more than $18 million in venture capital funding.