UShareSoft is working its way deeper into the cloud this week with two new software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that promise to make the lives of IT admins a little easier by cutting engineering costs and speeding time to value.
The UForge Appliance Factory helps IT pros assemble software appliances while the Open Appliance Studio serves as a framework for automatically deploying solutions in the field. Designed to work hand in hand, UShareSoft is hoping its duo of new products will become the means of choice for building and assembling optimized technology stacks for virtual data center and cloud offerings.
Predictable creation and cloning
UForge Appliance Factory works to let IT professionals predictably create, re-use, clone and maintain a complete software stack. UShareSoft promises its tools will simplify the delivery of software to physical, virtualized and cloud environments, including Amazon and VMware vCenter, for scale-up and scale-out computing.
France Telecom is among the customers currently testing the new products. UShareSoft expects customers to see advantages such as independence of image format. The company also expects its products to give organizations the ability to control its own software and governance processes.
UShareSoft’s automated process
How will UForge Appliance Factory delivery these benefits? By automating more of the process and relying less on manual tasks to create optimized stacks.
This approach, the company says, helps reduce errors and saves time. For example, UForge Appliance Factory offers one-click generation to many of the industry standard image formats, including Amazon AMI. The Appliance Factor also offers granular construction of cloning and maintenance tools, along with a catalogue of over 60 best of breed open-source projects.
Open Appliance Studio aims to take it one step further by letting IT admins turn an existing software stack into a vApp. The goal is to help independent software vendors (ISVs) better differentiate their products from the competition by giving them the ability to deliver self contained multi-node offerings that can be deployed in minutes to any cloud.
BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.
