Skytap had a busy week - it emerged out of stealth mode, changed its name from illumita (going from a some what confusing name to a name that better reflects the company's vision), and at the same time revealed the limited availability of its first product offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, a virtual lab automation solution available as an on-demand service over the Web. "Skytap provides customers with cloud-based se Skytap had a busy week – it emerged out of stealth mode, changed its name from illumita (going from a some what confusing name to a name that better reflects the company’s vision), and at the same time revealed the limited availability of its first product offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, a virtual lab automation solution available as an on-demand service over the Web. “Skytap provides customers with cloud-based services that enable them to capitalize on the wave of virtualization technology sweeping the industry,” said Scott Roza, chief executive officer of Skytap. “Cloud computing is gaining traction because a growing percentage of companies are demanding solutions that deliver value quickly, scale with business need, and don’t have the risk of an in-house implementation. Skytap’s Virtual Lab, which combines cloud-based virtualized infrastructure with an industry leading lab automation application, has tremendous potential to improve the timely delivery of quality applications to the business while increasing lab efficiency and lowering cost.”The company’s first product, Skytap Virtual Lab, may sound familiar to many of you. The company is entering a fairly crowded space to compete with industry veterans such as VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager and Surgient VQMS. Much like these other solutions, Skytap Virtual Lab enables application development and test teams to provision lab infrastructure on demand and automates the set-up, testing and tear down of complex, multi-tiered environments. Skytap’s solution differs from VMware and VMLogix in that the company offers their product as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, planning entry level subscriptions starting at $100/mo and virtual machine usage from as low as $1/hr. Other than the pricing model, this is very similar to what Surgient has been offering for years. Although in addition to their hosted solution, Surgient also offers an installable version for customer’s who want to create their virtual lab environment in-house or at a hosted datacenter facility of their choosing.Skytap seems to have a sharp group of people on their management team. Scott Roza, CEO, was the vice president of worldwide OEM and channel sales for HP/Opsware’s Business Service Automation business unit. Also from HP, Steve Brodie, CMO, has a solid background in this space as the former Sr. Director of products for the Mercury Performance Testing product line. In keeping with the HP theme, John Janakiraman, VP of Engineering and CTO, was the research manager for the Data Center Architecture team at HP Labs. Matt Perrine, VP of Sales and Business Development served as EMC’s first sales vice president for its Open Software Division. Ian Knox, Director of Product Marketing brings experience and knowledge from Microsoft where he acted as group product manager for Microsoft Visual Studio. And finally, Jed Stafford, Director of Operations, served as a Network Architect, also at Microsoft. According to the company, Skytap Virtual Lab capabilities include the following: Virtual Infrastructure On-Demand. Virtually unlimited hardware, software and storage available from any location and any browser. Skytap Virtual Lab scales up and down with software project demands and requires no upfront investment. Automated Set-Up and Tear-Down of Environments. A full-featured, Web-based virtual lab automation application that eliminates manual set-up and tear-down tasks and enables the rapid provisioning and replication of multi-machine production environments for development and testing. Skytap Library. A pre-populated software library that includes major operating systems, databases and applications in multiple languages that dramatically reduces media installation tasks and enables construction of lab environments by dragging and dropping pre-configured virtual machines. Collaboration in a Virtual Environment. The capability to instantly collaborate on software issues and defects in a virtualized environment. Entire multi-machine lab environments can be suspended and shared with distributed, global team members to enable reproduction and diagnosis of software bugs and issues.The company offers a product tour of its solution to try and give you a better visual as to what they are selling. Software Development