Surgient announced Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0, a solution enabling IT operations to deliver self-service computing resources to users while maintaining full administrative control. With physical provisioning and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V support, the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform optimizes IT's ability to support critical business initiatives, effectively manage diverse virtual resources and eliminate physical server and virtual machine (VM) sprawl.

"The proliferation of virtualization technology has placed an often unrealistic burden on IT departments to deliver increasingly complex computing environments to a larger number of users," said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Self-service portals, giving users the power to deliver pre-established, standardized environments for themselves, can alleviate IT of this burden and free up IT time and personnel for more critical tasks."

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0 reduces the burden on corporate IT departments by letting individual business units and users manage the reservation, configuration and deployment of virtual infrastructures needed to complete both simple and complex tasks. Surgient's solution is used by application development teams to configure virtual labs for application testing, by sales teams to prepare software demonstrations, and by HR and training teams to aid in internal and external software training.

Surgient 6.0 now features a new interface, post-deployment action, Microsoft Active Directory support and IBM Rational BuildForge integration, providing users with the industry's most robust self-service virtualization automation and lab management platform for delivering customized computing environments on-demand.

"With an increasing demand for infrastructure used for testing, training, and sales demonstrations, we needed a more cost effective, less time consuming process to provide the infrastructure needed by all of our business constituents," said Leif Peterson, CIO at QAD. "The Surgient Platform with the QA/Test Solution, Training Solution and Demo Solution enables us to maximize infrastructure utilization while simplifying and finding economies of scale across the organization."

"Surgient provides its customers with a unique policy-driven self-service approach that enables users to reserve, provision and access computing environments on their own schedules," said Tim Lucas, president and CEO, Surgient. "Our successful experience with large scale deployments continues to validate the value of Surgient to IT. Surgient builds upon this rich heritage of self-service and enterprise scalability by productizing key features requested by our existing Fortune 2000 user base. With support for Microsoft's Hyper-V platform, we are providing a broader, heterogeneous framework for enterprises to benefit from the cost-savings and management advantages that virtualization provides."

"Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is already delivering real business benefits to customers, and one of the reasons is that third-party solutions providers such as Surgient are providing solutions for the platform," said David Greschler, director of integrated virtualization strategy, Microsoft Corp. "Surgient and Microsoft have a long history of collaborating on the best ways that virtualization technology can provide strategic benefits to IT across test and development scenarios, as well as broader initiatives."

Features and Benefits

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0 provides users with a number of new features, designed to enhance usability, management and enterprise integration.

• Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
  
• Physical Provisioning Support
  
• New User Interface
  
• Post-deployment Actions
  
• Active Directory Support
• IBM Rational BuildForge Integration