What links JBoss, XenSource, Zimbra and MySQL (aside from the fact that they were all acquired for large amounts of money)? Peter Fenton and/or Benchmark Capital.

UPDATE This post corrects a couple of mistakes in the original version. UPDATE

Fenton made his investments in JBoss, Zimbra and XenSource while at Accel. Benchmark also invested in Zimbra, via Kevin Harvey who led the investment in MySQL. JBoss, sold to Red Hat for $350m; XenSource, sold to Citrix for $500m; Zimbra, sold to Yahoo for $350m; and MySQL, sold to Sun Microsystems for $1bn.

Whether you are a supporter of the current consolidation in open source vendors or not, you’ve got to hand it to Fenton/Benchmark when it comes to picking winners. Harvey also previously backed Red Hat as well. Meanwhile Benchmark’s current roster of open source vendors indicates that the future is also looking good.

As The 451 Group financial analyst, Brenon Daly, wrote in a The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase note published this morning:

“Having established its reputation as the ‘open source sultan’ by participating in nearly all the significant recent exits in the sector, Benchmark Capital has now moved to the other side of the table. The VC firm is the sole backer of SpringSource, which picked up Covalent on Tuesday. Benchmark led the $10m series A round for SpringSource last May, the only institutional money raised by the commercial venture based on the Spring application development framework.”

As well as SpringSource, Benchmark is also backing CollabNet, Engine Yard, Hyperic, Qlusters and Terracotta (another Fenton/Harvey joint pick). Clearly not all of those will achieve the exits JBoss, XenSource, Zimbra and MySQL did, but a couple of them could be there or thereabouts.