Early on, VMware realized that it needed to enhance its offerings and story around the use of virtualization to provide added benefit to development and testing organizations. To that end, VMware began aggressively pursuing a small start-up company, Akimbi Systems, for their QA testing product, Akimbi Slingshot. According to the Dow Jones News Wire, it looks as though VMware acquired Akimbi and their technology Early on, VMware realized that it needed to enhance its offerings and story around the use of virtualization to provide added benefit to development and testing organizations. To that end, VMware began aggressively pursuing a small start-up company, Akimbi Systems, for their QA testing product, Akimbi Slingshot. According to the Dow Jones News Wire, it looks as though VMware acquired Akimbi and their technology back in June for somewhere in the neighborhood of $59 million. VMware has been working hard to integrate the Slingshot product into their own product line. Now, VMware is ready to announce a beta product of that solution, appropriately named VMware Lab Manager 2.4. Interestingly, rather than starting over with a 1.0 release, VMware chose to continue the versioning of the product where Akimbi left off. The company described the product as a “premier Virtual Lab Automation System for Development and Test organizations. It provides software development and test infrastructure that automates the rapid setup and teardown of even the most complex multi-machine software configurations, shaving man-months off of software development projects.” Existing Akimbi and VMware customers have already been notified about open enrollment for beta testing of the product. Enrollment will continue through September 15th, and individuals that are accepted for the program will be notified on September 29th. Beta testing will begin around October 5th, where VMware hopes to get feedback on the ease of product installation, licensing, product quality, scalability and support readiness.Individuals will need to fill out and submit a Beta Application Form to be considered for the beta program. Software Development