Surgient changes strategy: from virtual lab automation to cloud computing implementation
Surgient has been one of the first startups to build value on top of virtual infrastructures in the early days of hardware virtualization, well before VMware led the technology to mainstream adoption.
Compared to its competitors, for a long time Surgient offered a hosted virtual lab automation platform.
Only in September 2008 it extended its business model, allowing customers to install the product on-premises.
That first change in strategy possibly depended on the limited interest that the market demonstrated so far in virtual lab automation solutions, despite Surgient has to compete with a really low number of vendors.
The fact that VMware is among those competitors doesn’t help: another company in this space, StackSafe, disappeared leaving no traces in March 2009 after just 15 months of activity.
Nonetheless Surgient managed to raise a revenue of $1 million per month in 2007 and was fortunate enough to raise a new round funding for $4.3M in August 2009.
The radical change of direction we are seeing today maybe has its roots in late 2008 when the company launched Virtual Automation Platform (VAP) 6.0, removing specific references to virtual lab automation and featuring a new policy-drive self-service portal that can be used for any sort of virtual machines lifecycle management activity.
Surgient even registered some patents to protect this new part of its platform.
Fast forward to 2010, the company launches a service to build an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private cloud in less than 30 days for the discounted price of $50,000.
The offering doesn’t say that this private cloud is for virtual lab automation (because it isn’t) and doesn’t even mention which hypervisor will be used (Surgient supports both VMware vSphere 4.0 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V).
The only explicit detail is that their Cloud Express includes 30 managed CPUs.
Implementing a private cloud infrastructure at that price is challenging for anybody. As virtualization.info detailed in one of the first posts of 2010, the whole idea of cloud computing implies not just automation, where Surgient has expertise, but also service level agreements, chargeback, strong security and interoperability.
It must be seen how the company has been able to pack multiple products together to provide all of these capabilities and deliver something that can be really called cloud.
This post will be updated as soon as we’ll have more information.
virtualization.info Newest articles
December 20th, 2011
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x…
December 20th, 2011
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and…
December 7th, 2011
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several…
December 7th, 2011
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and…
December 6th, 2011
In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which…
December 6th, 2011
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May…
December 6th, 2011
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The…
November 29th, 2011
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual…
November 21st, 2011
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this…
November 21st, 2011
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform…
November 17th, 2011
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS)…
November 17th, 2011
VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.
VKernel entered the virtualization market in…
November 16th, 2011
Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.
Suite 2012…
November 15th, 2011
In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress