CohesiveFT and Skytap announced a technology partnership to distribute CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to Skytap’s Virtual Lab platform. The combined solution will provide application development and test teams the capability to dynamically assemble and deploy custom application stacks to a virtual test cloud, freeing them from time-consuming build and set-up tasks and the constraints of traditional test lab environments.

As a first step in the partnership, Elastic Server-branded virtual machines will be available as templates in the Skytap Library for deployment to Skytap's Virtual Lab environment. The Skytap Library includes pre-built virtual machine images of common operating systems, servers and applications. With the addition of virtual machine images generated by Elastic Server, Skytap Virtual Lab users have access to these custom images on demand, eliminating the assembly of application stacks “by hand”.

“Development and test teams are on the leading edge of exploiting cloud-based virtual infrastructure to deliver tangible results to the business in terms of a more agile delivery platform and reduced costs,” said Scott Roza, chief executive officer of Skytap. “Adding Elastic Server virtual images to the Skytap Library demonstrates how combining cloud-based services can deliver significant value and productivity gains to customers.”

“Both Cohesive FT and Skytap share the vision of how cloud-computing services will accelerate the adoption of virtualization by companies looking to streamline their IT infrastructure,” said Pat Kerpan, president and chief technology officer of CohesiveFT. “Our partnership with Skytap will deliver a new class of solution where the ability to dynamically assemble and provision virtual machines is possible over the Web. This not only eliminates the typical administrative overhead of assembling virtual machine images “by hand,” but also enables these images to be deployed and hosted in a virtual environment on demand.”

CohesiveFT and Skytap’s joint solution enables:

• Publishing virtual machine images created by CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server On Demand to the Skytap Library
• Browsing and searching of CohesiveFT’s virtual machines through Skytap Virtual Lab’s user interface
• One-click deployment of CohesiveFT’s virtual machines into Skytap Virtual Lab

“Skytap and CohesiveFT’s combination of cloud-based services gives us a glimpse into how application teams will develop and test software in the future,” said Theresa Lanowitz, an analyst with voke. “As a new model for application delivery matures, we’ll see rapid adoption of cloud-based services by organizations of all sizes. Just as tool and process integration was driven by dramatic improvements in productivity and the resulting economic benefits, the shift to cloud-based services will be driven by the same market forces.”

Skytap and CohesiveFT’s integration roadmap includes providing full dynamic connectivity between the Elastic Server platform and Skytap Virtual Lab. This will give users the ability to assemble a virtual machine from CohesiveFT's extensive repositories of components and immediately deploy it to their virtual lab environment using their Skytap credentials.  

For more information on CohesiveFT or Skytap contact Ashley Halseth, ashley@communiquepr.com at Communique PR.