Surgient in 2008 and looking beyond to 2009

As virtualization in 2008 comes to an end, it is only fitting to discuss 2009 with a company that has been around the virtualization market since the early part of 2000. Surgient has been creating its virtualization automation and lab management solutions since 2003. So I sat down with the company’s CTO, Dave Malcolm, and asked him about the company and where things were going in 2009.

Q. Please tell us about your company. Tell us what you do and where you fit into the overall virtualization market?

A. A pioneer of the virtualization market, Surgient provides self-service virtualization automation and lab management solutions that optimize IT’s ability to support critical business initiatives, effectively manage diverse virtual resources and eliminate physical server and VM sprawl.

Recognizing the benefits of virtualization in the early 2000s, Surgient was the visionary behind Virtual Lab Management beginning in 2003 and introduced some of the first virtualization applications to the market – applications for software QA/Test, training, sales and marketing that are still in use today by major ISVs and global corporations. Today, Surgient partners with leading solution providers to offer Policy-Driven Self-Service virtual computing environments to Global 2000 enterprises. For instance, world-class companies including IBM, Merck, Raymond James, HP, Halliburton, EMC, CA, Iron Mountain, GE, SAP, Microsoft, Siemens, Intuit and others rely on Surgient to accelerate their growth and profitability by automating virtual infrastructure in support of their business initiatives.

Q. Can you tell us a bit more about your product?

A. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform is a sophisticated software automation and management platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to deliver self-service computing resources to users while maintaining full administrative control, effectively supporting critical business initiatives while also reducing overall IT costs. The Surgient Platform is designed to elevate IT Operations professionals above the daily, manual administration of computing resources, while still maintaining full control of the process. By automating and delegating the repeatable tasks associated with request management, provisioning and teardown, IT Ops is freed up to focus on higher level, more strategic projects, while also streamlining the experience for their constituents across the enterprise.

Using Surgient’s unique policy-driven self-service model, IT Ops can drastically reduce the time and energy spent administering resources, while additionally decreasing costs and increasing user satisfaction. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform has benefits across all areas of an enterprise:

• IT Operations staff can reduce IT operating and capital costs, eliminate the stream of manual provisioning requests and increase user productivity.
• Development and software Q/A testing personnel can accelerate software testing and increase quality with integrated virtual resource management.
• Training and education staffs can deliver hands-on learning with instructor-led and self-paced courses, regardless of software complexity, class size or delivery method.
• Sales and marketing personnel can accelerate sales cycles with simple, centralized creation, management and delivery of online software demonstrations and evaluations.
• Available either as a hosted environment or licensed offering.

Q. What has the company been up to in past few months?

A. Surgient continues to be the leader in policy-based self-service virtualization, providing a variety of solutions that help organizations reduce IT costs and drive more efficient use of IT resources across the entire organization. The company has remained profitable and has continued its growth over the past year. Even in the current economic climate, we expect this success to continue into 2009.

From a technology standpoint, Surgient continues to invest in its self-service virtualization solutions, providing more options for alleviating the burden on IT by further automating the provisioning of both physical and virtualized IT resources when and where they are needed. For instance, Surgient is now empowering a number of its customers to create their own internal or private cloud environments, where users, under IT control, can cost-effectively pull computing resources when needed.

Private clouds are attractive because they deliver the optimization benefits of virtualization and cloud computing, while at the same time enable IT managers to define on their own terms how the clouds are partitioned. In addition, companies are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by implementing self-service within the cloud, whether private internal, or external.

Based on its recent success, Surgient knows that many companies are looking to virtualization to create internal or private clouds. These companies are seeing the applicability of this approach to many audiences that IT serves, including QA and testing, software demos and training and even support.

Surgient has also expanded its partnerships with some of today’s leading IT companies, such as IBM and HP. Just last week, the company announced its integration with HP Quality Center 10.0, enabling software development and QA professionals to access the new HP solution to create, manage, and tear down Surgient-driven virtual lab environments that dramatically improve the efficiency of the software testing process.

Q. How do your products compare to similar offerings?

A. Surgient’s self-service approach sets it apart. Unlike limited point products that require active IT staff involvement, Surgient is the only company with a unique policy-driven self-service approach that enables users across the enterprise to reserve, provision and access computing environments on their own schedules, while IT maintains administrative control.

Surgient also supports multi-hypervisor virtualization, as well as heterogeneous virtual and physical environments. As virtualization moves to production environments, this type of “universal” support will be critical to ensuring that organizations get the most out of their existing and evolving computing resource needs. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform also features enterprise scalability so it is able to grow with any virtualization deployment, as well extensive integration with the leading lifecycle management tools. This comprehensive support for nearly any enterprise environment ensures that Surgient users will see a more immediate return on their self-service virtualization investments.

Q. What do you see for the future of IT and virtualization in 2009?

A. First and foremost, the economic crisis will impact the IT market, but not as hard as some are predicting. Companies will continue to adopt virtualization technology to improve ROI and reduce operating costs.

Surgient expects to see greater adoption of virtualization technologies in both pre-production and production environments. This will be driven by the increased need to manage these expanding virtual infrastructures and ensure that they are operating at their fullest capacity. Things like automation, scalability and manageability will become critical components of virtualization deployments as they move into production environments.

Companies, like Surgient, with more mature virtualization solutions that can be applied across virtual and physical infrastructures will enable companies to get the most out of existing resources. Virtualization is one of the key tools for helping companies do more with less. Organizations will also likely adopt external cloud and Software-as-a-Service applications in those instances where cost is the deciding factor. However, these types of applications do not provide IT with the control required to ensure resources are being efficiently utilized.

To no one’s surprise, the hypervisor wars between VMware, Microsoft and to some extent Citrix will continue into 2009, with Microsoft likely gaining some market share on VMware. Overall, 2009 should be a good year for most virtualization companies that can provide a clear, and often quick, ROI.

Special thanks to Dave Malcolm for taking the time to speak with me.