VMware has announced that TradeBeam, Inc. is using VMware vSphere 4 to power its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.

TradeBeam's SaaS offering provides over 6,000 organizations with import and export compliance, inventory management, shipment tracking, supply-chain event management, and global trade finance solutions. TradeBeam has embraced cloud computing as the strategic direction for its IT operations, leading the company to evaluate VMware vSphere4 as a platform to transform its datacenter into a cloud infrastructure. VMware vSphere 4 is designed to aggregate and holistically manage large collections of IT resources -- including CPUs, storage and network equipment -- as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. During the beta program, TradeBeam found VMware vSphere 4 to be extremely effective for managing the company's heterogeneous environment, which includes high-capacity storage systems and sophisticated networking technologies.

"Cloud computing is the future for us, and VMware vSphere 4 is an ideal platform," said Nasser Mirzai, vice president of IT at TradeBeam. "In our business, prospective customers would need to have similar environment to the production systems during the on-boarding phase for their training and process re-engineering for weeks or even months. In the past, we had to dedicate large amounts of computing resources for each new customer. It's very expensive to scale that type of sales model. VMware vSphere 4 allows us to pool our computing resources in an internal cloud. We can then carve out a virtualized piece of the infrastructure for any new customer aside from the production systems. We can manage our resources and increase utilization much more efficiently while helping our customers with their budgets and deployment."

During the beta program, TradeBeam was particularly interested in VMware vSphere 4 features that maximize efficiency and control. VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, for example, can help TradeBeam expand its use of shared storage and reduce storage-related costs by up to 50 percent. Another new feature, VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch, helps simplify network management and configuration and nearly eliminates the possibility of human error. Other new features, such as VMware Fault Tolerance, can help TradeBeam ensure high availability and operational resiliency at a fraction of the cost and effort required for traditional tools.

"The capabilities and tools in VMware vSphere 4 really do seem too good to be true," said Mirzai. "In addition to the enhancements in efficiency and control, VMware vSphere will give us choice -- the flexibility to utilize nearly any type of server, any storage system, and any OS that could help our company. That's important because we have a heterogeneous environment with products and solutions from multiple vendors. The beauty of a cloud is that it aggregates these resources and allows us to deploy internally or with a VMware vCloud service provider, enabling us to choose where we want the application to live. VMware vSphere 4 will allow us to bring everything together seamlessly so we can run applications more efficiently, accelerate time to market, and optimize reliability and performance. I've found vSphere to be a great fit for our cloud roadmap."

VMware vSphere 4 offers organizations like TradeBeam an evolutionary, non-disruptive path to cloud computing that helps to decrease IT costs while positioning IT to be a flexible and responsive service provider. VMware vSphere 4 will enable TradeBeam's applications to be provisioned via the cloud on-demand and with guaranteed service levels. VMware vSphere 4 is now generally available. For more information on VMware vSphere please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/vSphere.