It is not often that Kleiner Perkins is able to participate in a $100M+ deal in the cleantech sector without sending the cleantech media and blogosphere into a virtual frenzy. But that is exactly what happened last week.

On January 5th, Kleiner and TCV announced a $135M investment into OSIsoft, a leading developer of data management solutions for industrial energy efficiency applications. While I spotted the news in PEHub, I couldn’t find a single mention of the deal in my usual cleantech news sources.

I gave it 24 hours. Nothing. It is a week later now and still no mention. Silver Spring signs a partnership deal with Control 4 and everyone falls over themselves to get the story out, but Kleiner buys a significant stake in a highly profitable company with over 10,000 customer installations and it’s like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

Even more remarkable is that OSIsoft should be a poster child for the cleantech venture sector’s current theme of 2011 – capital efficiency. OSIsoft is a software business that specializes in aggregating data from disparate systems in industrial environments. The company is no startup venture. It was founded in 1980 and now employees over 500 people.

While the company doesn’t comment publicly on revenue and profitability, a 2008 corporate presentation cites $160M+ in revenue. For a business built organically that continues to invest significantly in R&D, it is a safe assumption that it is producing plenty of cash.

And where there is an established business with healthy cash flow and the potential to ratchet up the growth curve, private equity money will come knocking. While OPower may have boldly proclaimed that they didn’t really need Kleiner’s money, OSIsoft truly didn’t. This is not a venture deal and OSIsoft VP of Marketing Jon Peterson confirmed for me that the investment was primarily providing liquidity to existing shareholders and not direct investment back into the business.

The existing shareholders deserve liquidity as they have built an incredibly successful business that is poised for growth as the company begins to position itself as a leading provider of smart grid and broader energy efficiency applications. They already serve many of the world’s leading power producers and industrial manufacturers and provide a data aggregation solution that may emerge as an important development platform for third party application developers looking to build analytics and optimization packages.

I believe that this deal is an important signal of things to come. As our work for the Department of Energy on the Smart Grid Ecosystem pointed out, the majority of vendors providing solutions into the smart grid market are not startups. They are companies that have been around for quite awhile. While they may not be based in a trendy loft space, they are likely producing significant revenue from legacy product lines. With the venture model under pressure in the cleantech sector, I predict we will start to see more interesting deal activity from private equity players seeking out opportunities with established vendors.

It may not set the blogosphere abuzz, but it makes for good business.

(cross posted from http://blog.cleantech.com)