Electric Cloud, the enterprise-class software production management house, has pushed into virtualization on the back of a co-marketing and sales arrangement with VMware.

It's integrating its ElectricCommander widgetry with VMware Lab Manager to deliver dynamically provisioned virtual machines for the software build-test-deploy process. It should be available at the end of the year.

Lab Manager automatically sets up and manages the virtual machines and infrastructure and ElectricCommander automates the software development processes that run on them.

It's supposed to be a "push button" environment for build-test-deploy tasks using heterogeneous tools in virtualized environments.

When done manually such things can be a nightmare, involving a dozen unintegrated tools held together by scripts and brittle interfaces.

Electric Cloud says that when used together, software development organizations can go from running developer builds and functional tests to kicking off the entire software production process across multiple platforms on the same hardware.

In the process it can improve quality through frequent testing on all target environments and configurations as well as reduce cost and server sprawl.

ElectricCommander, which claims folks like Qualcomm and Paypal as users on physical machines, is supposed to be developer-friendly and easy-to-use. It says it's got 70 customers worldwide - all in production - and no shelfware.

Electric Cloud is four-years-old and should turn profitable late next year, according to its CEO Mike Maciag. It's backed by $20 million in VC from the Mayfield Fund, USVP, RRE and Rembrandt.

Cost can run from $100,000 to $1 million with the average spend about $150,000 right now, Maciag said.