During 2011, companies across the globe increasingly embraced open source virtualization and cloud tools - turning to Convirture, maker of virtualization and cloud management software, to manage them.

Convirture announced its fifth consecutive quarter-over-quarter growth, including increasing its customer base ten-fold for its commercial product, ConVirt Enterprise. The company now has customers in every global region, including North and South America, EMEA and Asia. The open source version of ConVirt has now been downloaded more than 60,000 times. In total, ConVirt software, which is available for most major Linux distributions including Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, is now being used by more than 8,000 businesses.

"Linux-based virtualization is here, it's real and clearly there is an appetite for something other than VMware when it comes to managing cloud computing and virtualization technologies," said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. "As KVM and Xen continue to gain traction with enterprise customers, we expect to see even faster growth through 2012."

ConVirt software provides sophisticated, enterprise-grade software for managing virtualization and private-cloud environments based on open platforms such as Linux, Xen and KVM.

In 2011, the company's product lineup was rounded out to include ConVirt Enterprise Cloud, which was made available in the fourth quarter as a commercially-licensed product. The software provides the capability to manage an entire virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single console, including private clouds, hybrid clouds, traditional virtual machines as well as public cloud resources such as Amazon EC2.

ConVirt Open Source provides the core functionality for managing virtualized environment, including monitoring, configuration management, templates-based provisioning, and live migration. ConVirt Open Source is free to download and use, while support from Convirture is there when needed.

ConVirt Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with advanced automation and scalability features, such as high availability and dynamic resource allocation, necessary to run large-scale or mission critical virtualization environments. ConVirt Enterprise is a commercially-licensed product.

Partnering in Open Source Ecosystem
In 2011, Convirture partnered with Eucalyptus Systems, creators of the leading independent private cloud platform, to deliver enterprise-grade private cloud management capabilities to Eucalyptus users and customers that were previously only available on closed-source products.

In addition, Convirture joined the OpenStack initiative, an open source community backed by more than 75 participating organizations around the globe that was designed to create freely available code, standards, and common ground for the benefit of both cloud providers and cloud customers.

Convirture was also an early member of the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative, as KVM comes into its own as a viable alternative to closed and expensive virtualization products from the likes of VMware and Citrix.

Progress Noted with Award and Certifications
Convirture earned an 'Innovations in Information Technology ' Golden Bridge Award for Best Virtualization Software last August.

Entering the new year, ConVirt is certified to run on the following operating systems:

. CentOS 6.0

. RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.0

. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

. SUSE SLES 11 SP1

And it now supports management of cloud services including:

. Amazon EC2

. OpenStack 1.0

. Eucalyptus 2.0.2

A complete list of all the virtualization and cloud platforms that can be managed using ConVirt can be found at www.convirture.com/support_configurations.php.

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