CloudShare is looking to reduce the time and expense traditionally associated with moving virtualized IT environments to the cloud with its FastUpload product, which the company will introduce April 19.
CloudShare, which makes products that enable businesses to quickly build and
share copies of their complex IT environments in a cloud computing environment,
plans to roll out a product that will let enterprises quickly upload existing
virtual machines as a cloud-based service.
FastUpload, to be announced April 19, is the latest offering
from CloudShare designed to let enterprises use the capabilities of cloud
computing to quickly share their IT environments with others, according to
Kevin Epstein, vice president of marketing at the
3-year-old
company.
CloudShare aims to do for solution providers and ISVs what
Cisco Systems' WebEx did for businesses: create an easy way to share data with
remote colleagues over the Web.
Before WebEx, setting up a traditional Webcast was a lot of
work, from bringing in a dedicated camera crew to having everyone dial into the
meeting, Epstein said in an interview.
"With WebEx, it became intrinsically easy for any normal
person to [set up and launch an online meeting] within 15 minutes,"
Epstein said.
In CloudShare's case, users are sharing production-grade
replicas of their IT environments, which are delivered as SAAS (software as a service).
These can include demos, proofs-of-concept, training or other enterprise
applications.
CloudShare launched its namesake Enterprise
version in 2009 while still in stealth mode. In February 2010,
CloudShare released its
Pro version, which offers some of the same features as the Enterprise
edition.
Company officials said the products can be used for sales
demos, training or collaboration.
Now CloudShare is rolling out FastUpload, which will enable
businesses to upload existing in-house VMware-based virtual IT environments to
the cloud, making them available as a cloud-based service, in as little as 15
minutes, Epstein said.
The product will remove a lot of the time and expense
associated with the sharing of virtual environments, he said. Currently, the
most popular ways of sharing virtualized IT environments is to use standard
FTP, which can hours or days, or putting them onto storage media and sending
them via Federal Express, which can take a day or more and comes with a host of
security risks.
Businesses can also use host importers, but that usually comes
with a fee.
Epstein said FastUpload offers benefits to workers such as tech
support pros, who can be given a copy of the virtual environment to debug, and
can supply remote offices with instant provisioning and training, and learning
and certification.
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