I recently read about Surgient's third quarter success and about the release of their latest virtual lab automation product, VQMS. I spoke with the company's VP of Product Strategy, Erik Josowitz, to find out how these things affect the company going forward, as well as to find out more about the competition provided by VMware. You recently announced record third quarter earnings and said the company is on track I recently read about Surgient’s third quarter success and about the release of their latest virtual lab automation product, VQMS. I spoke with the company’s VP of Product Strategy, Erik Josowitz, to find out how these things affect the company going forward, as well as to find out more about the competition provided by VMware. You recently announced record third quarter earnings and said the company is on track for nearly 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth, to what do you attribute this success? Erik Josowitz, VP Product Strategy, Surgient: There is tremendous momentum right now around virtualization, just look at the VMware IPO and the acquisition by Citrix of XenSource and all the interest around those. More mainstream customers around realizing that virtualization must be part of their technology strategy. Those that are attempting to use server virtualization technologies are realizing that they provide only partial solutions, which leads them to investigate complementary solutions, like virtual lab management applications, that accelerate their time-to-benefit from virtualization. Is heterogeneity in your product a big selling point? Or are most of your customers using VMware ESX Server? EJ: Support for heterogeneous virtual and physical infrastructure is part of the discussion we have with customers in every sales cycle, even though most customers today are using our products with VMware ESX Server. The reason heterogeneity is such an important part of the conversation, I think, is that customers want to keep their options open. They realize that virtualization is really still an early technology and there will be alot of changes in the coming months and years. VMware is the current virtualization giant in the marketplace. With so many people now entering that space, one way to differentiate yourself is by expanding into the application market. And VMware has really been doing that for the past two years. How do you differentiate your product offering from VMware’s Lab Manager product? EJ: I think VMware has made some good acquisitions over the past 2 years that help them move up the stack and provide more than infrastructure. As a best-of-breed partner and vendor, Surgient’s strategy is to differentiate by providing advanced features and broad platform support that goes well beyond VMware’s in-the-box solutions. Surgient’s products differ from VMware Lab Manager by supporting more complex labs that better mirror what is deployed in production, enabling larger teams to more effectively share a centralized lab, and by providing tighter integration with common enterprise test management systems. We look at Surgient VQMS as an enterprise test lab management solution and VMware Lab Manager as a “workgroup” solution. With VMware’s acquisition of Akimbi and the ultimate release of VMware Lab Manager, what kind of changes have there been with your partnership? EJ: Surgient was one of the first software vendors to integrate with VMware ESX Server and we continue to have a strong technology relationship with them – their acquisition of Akimbi didn’t change that. As VMware has grown as a company they have added resources to better support their software partner and, in many ways, we work together much better now then we ever have. Of course we don’t do much in the way of joint sales or marketing activities because we compete with VMware Lab Manager, but on the whole we feel it’s a great relationship. You recently announced a new version of VQMS, your automated virtual lab provisioning software for software developers and quality assurance testers, what new features stand out in this release? EJ: We recently released Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS) version 5.3. The focus in 5.3 was making it easier to get started using the virtual lab environment, making it better to use in the most common enterprise environments and also to broaden our heterogeneous platform support. So we added an easier installation and configuration system in v5.3 as well as a new community support system through the Surgient Success website. We added advanced agentless networking capabilities in 5.3 that take the ability to create and clone labs that mirror the production environment to the next level, including advanced VLAN support that can coordinate at the switch. We also, as always, support the latest versions of virtual infrastructure from Microsoft and VMware. Some people may not be aware of it, but your company also offers software that helps with software demonstration and training using virtual machines and automated provisioning. Can you tell us a little more about what those products offer your customers and how they are using them? EJ: Our vision for virtual labs has always been as a platform that supports then entire software development and deployment lifecycle (SDLC). In each phase of the SDLC you have different individuals, roles and workflows and we package those commonalities into applications that can best deliver the business results required by those teams. Enterprise software companies, for example, have seen big changes in the size and complexity of deployment architecture of their applications and this has led to difficulties in demonstrating and supporting the evaluation of those applications. We have an application, Virtual Demo Lab Management System that uses virtual labs to solve these problems and understands the specific needs of the software pre-sales process. Similarly, many companies face challenges when it comes to educating the user community around enterprise applications. Studies show that people learn better when they have the ability to practice what they have learned, but it’s difficult to support this in the production roll-out of an application. We have an application, Virtual Training Lab Management System, that uses virtual labs to support the classroom deployment of hands-on application training labs. This enables, for example, each student to have their own version of a production application where they can practice new skills and thus be ready to work with new applications when they are deployed. More and more we see IT operations groups charged with supporting the entire SDLC and our goal is to make sure that we have the best-of-breed applications that help them most effectively use virtual labs to achieve their goals. What is the best way for people to learn more about virtual labs and Surgient’s virtual lab management applications? EJ: We have a community site, Surgient Success (http://success.surgient.com/), which provides discussion forums, best practices information, tutorials and other information to help ensure that their is broad understanding about the use and benefits of virtual lab management applications. We also encourage that people download Surgient VQMS and try it out and compare it to other virtual lab management applications. The product is available for free download with a 45-day evaluation license at the Surgient website (http://www.surgient.com/download). We also regularly host webinars to help educate people about the benefits of virtual labs. Many recorded webinars, as well as white papers, case studies and other information, are available on the Surgient website.I’d like to thank Erik Josowitz for taking time out to speak with me about this subject. Software Development