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Quest Software Has Completed Its Acquisition of Surgient

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Quest Software earlier this month announced the completion of its acquisition of privately held Surgient, a leader in private cloud automation software.

Surgient, located in Austin, Texas, will expand Quest virtualization management capabilities by enabling organizations to automate the deployment and management of secure private cloud infrastructures to gain business agility and reduce costs.

Private cloud computing is emerging as a fundamental requirement for businesses. As a leading provider of cloud automation solutions, Surgient provides a patented and proven technology that supports heterogeneous hypervisor environments and diverse customer environments, including mid-market, enterprise, and managed service providers.

Quest will continue to market and sell the Surgient cloud platform and offer customers the company’s popular Cloud Express, which provides a private cloud of 30 CPUs in 30 days.

Quest Buys Private Cloud Automation Software Maker Surgient

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Quest Software has announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Surgient, a provider of private cloud automation software.

The Austin, Texas-based company’s Surgient Platform enables organizations to deploy and manage secure cloud infrastructures to gain business agility and reduce costs.

With the Surgient Automation Platform, organizations can create robust and secure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds that may be shared across the organization. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

Private cloud computing is emerging as a fundamental requirement for businesses.

According to a recent IDC survey, 73 percent of all organizations are evaluating, planning or have already implemented private cloud strategies. As a leading provider of cloud automation solutions, Surgient provides a patented and proven technology that supports heterogeneous hypervisor environments and diverse customer environments including mid-market, enterprise and managed service providers.

Surgient has more than 60 customers with 160 successful deployments.

Surgient Launches Microsoft Virtualization Solution for Lab Automation and IT Operations

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Surgient today announced a number of initiatives in cooperation with Microsoft. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform integrates with virtualized systems running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing IT and Quality Assurance professionals with self-service access to resources for testing IT services throughout the deployment process. Surgient’s approach streamlines VM lifecycle management and automates virtualized infrastructure, reducing capital and operating costs, and increasing user productivity.

Manual or semi-automated processes for deploying IT services are expensive and time-consuming, and create a daunting task for IT operations. The high rate-of-change of testing environments further exacerbates this challenge, creating the need for consolidation of testing infrastructure with virtualization, combined with enterprise-class lab automation, dynamic capacity management and self-service experience. With Surgient and Microsoft software, IT can streamline virtualized infrastructure management, automate resource administration, and provide an easy-to-use self-service interface for virtual resource users.

With lab, lifecycle and stage management, the Surgient Platform, with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, is a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtualized infrastructure.

The solution has been tested in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, Wash., against a complex, multi-tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture.

For the implementation, Microsoft and Surgient IT professionals were challenged with the traditional issues surrounding test environment deployment: underutilized compute capacity, difficult setup and teardown, and limited cloning and replication. To address these challenges, existing physical infrastructure and content was quickly virtualized using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and then registered with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The combination of Microsoft virtualization and Surgient automation resulted in: a dramatically improved deployment process, further resource consolidation, simultaneous deployment of identical multi-machine SAP configurations, and a self-service experience for end users.

Surgient Releases Virtual Automation Platform 6.0

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Surgient (previous coverage) today announced Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0, a solution enabling IT operations to deliver self-service computing resources to users while maintaining full administrative control. With physical provisioning and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V support, the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform optimizes IT’s ability to support critical business initiatives, effectively manage diverse virtual resources and eliminate physical server and virtual machine (VM) sprawl.

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0 reduces the burden on corporate IT departments by letting individual business units and users manage the reservation, configuration and deployment of virtual infrastructures needed to complete both simple and complex tasks. Surgient’s solution is used by application development teams to configure virtual labs for application testing, by sales teams to prepare software demonstrations, and by HR and training teams to aid in internal and external software training.

Surgient 6.0 now features a powerful new interface, post-deployment action, Microsoft Active Directory support and IBM Rational BuildForge integration, providing users with the industry’s most robust self-service virtualization automation and lab management platform for delivering customized computing environments on-demand.

Surgient will demonstrate its new offering at two upcoming industry events. The company is a silver sponsor of the Microsoft Get Virtual Now launch event on September 8 in Bellevue, Wash. In addition, Surgient is a silver sponsor of VMworld, held Sept. 15-18 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0 is available as either a licensed, onsite installation, where companies fully control the implementation and operation of the system, or as a hosted solution, enabling companies to get started immediately. General availability begins on September 30, 2008, and license pricing starts at $25,000.

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Surgient To Use IBM Jazz Platform To Enable More Efficient Application Development

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Surgient today announced it will offer integrated solutions with products built using IBM Jazz collaborative technologies. As a result, IBM quality assurance users can use Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform to allocate IT resources and set up and tear down virtual labs on-demand for software testing and quality assurance, introducing new efficiencies to the application development lifecycle.

IBM Jazz provides an open and extensible platform on top of which IBM, business partners and clients are building new development tools that integrate collaboration, team awareness and project health into every aspect of the software development lifecycle. Later this year, Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform will include an integration with IBM Rational Quality Manager, comprehensive test planning and process software that provides a single view into all aspects of a quality plan. Surgient’s product currently integrates with IBM’s Rational BuildForge.

By implementing the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform, development and QA organizations will benefit from Surgient’s self-service IT solution for virtual lab management. IBM Rational customers using IBM Rational Quality Manager can request and build a live application testing environment with specific configurations without manual administration from a company’s IT department, freeing up IT personnel to address additional business critical initiatives. Surgient was a visionary behind virtual lab management beginning in 2003 and now serves many of the world’s largest companies.

Surgient, meanwhile, is still being rumored to be either planning an IPO or serving as high-profile acquisition target.

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Surgient Partners With Capgemini, IPO or Acquisition Imminent?

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Capgemini, provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, announced today that Capgemini Financial Services USA has signed an alliance agreement with Surgient.

“By partnering with Surgient, we can now offer clients access to environment configurations through a centrally managed, shared service, eliminating manual provisioning work and delivering much higher utilization of expensive pre-production infrastructure. The results expected are shorter response times, reduced costs and ultimately, better business support,” said Charlie Li, vice president of the Quality Management and Testing Practice at Capgemini’s Financial Services Strategic Business Unit. “Delivering quality applications is closely tied to performance and reputation — and with this innovative virtualization solution, we can help global firms become more agile and better focus on their frontier application strategy in meeting their diverse and growing business needs.”

Meanwhile, VMblog points to a month old article on Austin Business Journal about Surgient, speculating about a future IPO or acquisition.

Surgient apparently hit its stride this year after tweaking its sales approach last summer, allowing companies to buy licenses for its virtual lab management software. President and CEO Tim Lucas says the growing popularity of virtualization gave Surgient the boost and a chance to double its revenue this year.

Lucas expects revenue to exceed $20 million for 2008.  And the company has recently signed 20 large customer deals, including German tech companies SAP AG and Siemans AG.  “We’re profitable now and cash flow is funding the growth of the business,” he says.

A report by The 451 Group cites HP and Borland Software as possible buyers of the Austin company. Lucas agrees that acquisition is a possibility but says an initial public offering could be considered as well.

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