Electric Cloud and VMware Team to Extend Lab Manager

Electric Cloud’s software production management solution is going to be integrated with VMware’s Lab Manager product to help deliver dynamically provisioned virtual machines for the software build-test-deploy process.

VMware and Electric Cloud believe there is something to be said about this partnership. VMware’s Lab Manager automatically sets up and manages virtual machines and the virtual infrastructure, while on the other hand, ElectricCommander automates the software development processes that run on them. Combining these two solutions will deliver what the companies are calling a “push button” environment for software build, test and deploy tasks using heterogeneous tools in virtualized environments.

“Our integration with VMware Lab Manager will help software development and IT teams harness the power of the virtual lab to save time and improve development productivity,” said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO. “We have seen increasing demand from customers looking to take advantage of virtualization for software production. We’re pleased to leverage VMware technology to deliver this strategic, tightly-integrated solution.”

The integration of these two products allows development shops to easily provision virtual machine configurations and automatically run the build, test and deploy processes that were previously manual, disconnected and resource-inefficient.

The name of the game for solutions like this is to help software development shops minimize the bottlenecks that affect them during a normal software development lifecycle. Using virtualization solutions like this will help these shops bring their software to market faster and with higher software quality, while at the same time achieving higher productivity and reduced IT costs.

The story is a good one and the pain points real. Software developers and testers usually get the short end of the stick when it comes to the quality and quantity of the equipment allocated to them, and yet they are still expected to produce a high quality product in a short period of time. Solutions like this can only help.

Electric Cloud is going to have to make the most of its new found partnership and joint marketing efforts with VMware as they are going to have to go up against long time players in this market such as Surgient and VMLogix.

The company plans on delivering the VMware Lab Manager integration as part of an ElectricCommander release available sometime at the end of this year.

You can also register for a future Webcast hosted by InfoWorld titled “Harness The Power Of Virtualization For Fast, Self-Service Build-Test-Package-Deploy Processes” presented by Electric Cloud and VMware taking place on 12/6/07 at 11:00AM Pacific Standard Time.