CloudShare goes after Surgient customers after Quest acquisition

Last week, Quest Software announced it had completed the acquisition of Surgient and its private cloud automation software. It looks as though Quest pulled what has become widely known as “a Victor Kiam,” meaning as a customer of Surgient, Quest liked the company so much they decided to buy it.

With the Surgient purchase, Quest hopes to expand its virtualization management capabilities by being able to allow customers to automate the deployment and management of secure private cloud infrastructures to gain business agility and reduce costs. The deal will enable Quest to compete for mindshare with some of the big boys in software industry who are also going after the private cloud market, companies like BMC, CA, Microsoft, and VMware.

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The Surgient cloud platform will be added into the Quest Vizioncore virtualization suite, which already includes products such as vRanger and vReplicator for backup and business continuity, vConverter for physical-to-virtual (P2V) machine migration, vFoglight for VM performance monitoring, and vOptimizer for VM storage management. Oddly enough, at the same time as this rollup of Surgient, the Vizioncore name is also going through a re-branding effort and next month will become the Quest Server Virtualization Management Group.

The Surgient technology also seems to fit in nicely with Quest’s move to support a more heterogeneous hypervisor environment since it works with VMware VI3, vSphere 4, and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Surgient supports physical provisioning in addition to virtual by integrating with third-party server provisioning and configuration management software — another potential win for Quest.

Quest said it would continue to market and sell the Surgient cloud platform and offer its customers the Surgient Cloud Express, a scaled-down private cloud offering made up of less than 30 managed CPUs that can be rapidly deployed within 30 days. However, nothing was mentioned about what happens to Surgient’s hosted cloud environment. It seems Surgient may have already disbanded or been in the process of dismantling the hosting side of the business in favor of its on-premise cloud software.

That seems to be an area where Surgient competitor CloudShare wants to come in and make immediate inroads. On the heels of Quest’s announcement, CloudShare made an announcement of its own: a swap-out incentive program called “Trade up to the Cloud” where existing Surgient customers can, as CloudShare put it, “avoid the blues by migrating to CloudShare’s hosted IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) platform.”

According to CloudShare representatives, the “Trade up to the Cloud” swap-out program for Surgient customers will provide a worry-free migration path to CloudShare and free use of the company’s full enterprise product for the duration of 2010 for customers who sign up for 2011.

“With Surgient’s recent acquisition, customers with substantial investment in Surgient’s private cloud automation software are understandably concerned about future product direction and support,” said Zvi Guterman, CEO of CloudShare. “We want to alleviate headaches by providing Surgient customers a seamless upgrade from software to the cloud. We encourage Surgient users to try CloudShare for themselves and discover why so many customers have made the switch.”

Will Surgient customers really make a switch now that the products are owned by a larger, more stable entity? And why would they move to CloudShare? CloudShare says that one of its advantages is that there is no on-premise installation of software or hardware for its clients or end-users. Instead, CloudShare hosts the solution.

CloudShare said it is a seamless process to migrate existing Surgient customers over to the company’s hosted cloud model. It takes the client’s existing virtual machines and networks and load them into the CloudShare cloud environment. Then the customer can choose to add permissions and “use packages” so that end-users can lease copies for an hour or a month, for example. The longest part of the migration, according to the company, is usually the branding of the new environment. CloudShare creates a private label, meaning the hosted environment looks as though it is an extension of the client’s own corporate website. To do that, the company needs to make sure to follow and respect the client’s brand guidelines.

“Surgient had the right idea for internal virtual labs, and we have great respect for their team,” said Kevin Epstein, vice president of marketing at CloudShare. “But it seems like they failed to navigate that whole turn that IT as an industry is making into the cloud.

“We firmly believe that the future is about instant gratification and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) and not the same old approaches relabeled with new buzzwords. Simply moving virtual machines around is not enough. ‘Cloud automation’ is a commodity, and that’s why we have our free product doing that. The real value is in the higher level business functions,” Epstein said.

Epstein made the prediction that within the next five years, all of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) companies will be offering ITaaS — calling it “an obvious progression.” Look at hardware companies like IBM, HP, and Dell, he said. In the 1980s, a computer was ordered as a bare-metal machine that came with CDs and disks. But today consumers can order an email system and a fully configured, fully loaded rack appears that is a complete working system, ready to go. Why then, Epstein asks, does IaaS give you blank, individual virtual machines like we’re back in the 1980s?”

ITaaS — the ability to quickly create, manage, share, and track full IT environments on demand, assembled in public or privately branded marketplaces — is what the world wants when they say “cloud,” according to Epstein.

If you aren’t an existing Surgient customer, you can still see what CloudShare is talking about by taking advantage of the company’s free CloudShare Pro offering. Choose a name, add no more than six virtual machines, and within minutes you can have your own data center in the cloud.

This story, “CloudShare goes after Surgient customers after Quest acquisition,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.