Surgient offers a virtual lab automation tool called VQMS (Virtual QA/Test Management System).
Its only competitor, Akimbi, has been acquired in June by the virtualization market leader VMware, and its product, Slingshot, is now rebranded as Virtual Lab Manager, with an expected beta launch for October.
Since Surgient currently is the only virtualization company which doesn’t provide a direct way to download a trial version of its software, virtualization.info asked for an evaluation copy or a webcasted live demo of the company products since 6 months.
So far virtualization.info always received a request to wait for the new product release (5.0), planned for May 2006 (as older versions of the Virtualization Industry Roadmap reported until the delay reached 1 month).
At at today virtualization.info still has never tried any product from the company and it’s still waiting for a communication for the new release, assuming it’s still delayed.
But surprisingly today InfoWorld published a review of the new VQMS 5.0, rating it 8/10 (Very Good).
The appearence of this review is pretty strange also because at the moment of writing Surgient didn’t release an official announcement about the availability of its 5.0 version (a strange behaviour for a company which usually issues an official annoucement for every single webcast it hosts), but already linked the InfoWorld review on its homepage.
The real value of the review is also questionable since InfoWorld hosts since months a virtualization blog completely edited by David Marshall, Senior Architect at Surgient.
The VQMS 5.0 review has been written by another writer but a link between two companies is evident.
If any virtualizaton.info reader has ever seen or implemented Surgient products in his company I invite him to write a comment providing his own experience.
Update: Surgient Vice President of Marketing, Erik Josowitz, has been so kind to promptly comment this article, informing company product’s new release will be officially announced on October 2nd.