Skytap announced a strategic alliance with SAVVIS to resell Skytap's Virtual Lab service. The alliance enables SAVVIS customers to conduct software development and testing in the cloud using Skytap's Virtual Lab Platform, and subsequently run these applications in production as part of SAVVIS' new software as a service (SaaS) hosting platform and enablement services.

"Skytap's cloud platform is an ideal complement to our new SaaS solution, representing a new model for the development and delivery of applications," said Larry Steele, Technical Vice President, SaaS Services, with SAVVIS. "Our alliance with Skytap provides one part of our complete 'SaaS' application lifecycle management solution, with a closed-loop mechanism for dynamically managing pre-production environments."

Skytap Virtual Lab provides virtualized infrastructure, including hardware, storage and networking resources. Customers get access to a complete virtual lab solution on demand including a pre-populated virtual machine library with major operating systems, databases and other application software.

High cost, dynamic environments, such as application development and QA, IT ops testing, training and demo environments, are ideal candidates to transition to a cloud-based virtual lab because they are often the most expensive to administer and require frequent set-up and tear-down. Using Skytap Virtual Lab enables self-service, on-demand scaling of environments as needed and eliminates the cost of underutilized hardware. Skytap also allows organizations to benefit from the management and automation capabilities of a fully automated virtual lab solution, leading to huge productivity increases.

"The promise of cloud computing is a reality for our customers, and we are eager for SAVVIS' customers to have access to these capabilities as part of SAVVIS' total 'SaaS' solution," said Scott Roza, Skytap CEO. "By giving them the ability to quickly and affordably scale up and down to support peak testing requirements, SAVVIS customers will be able to reduce costs and time-to-market of new applications."

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