Tideway Systems, one of the fastest growing providers of IT automation software, today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation™ as a virtual appliance.  A first for the industry, the Tideway virtual appliance accelerates the deployment of Foundation 7.0, Tideway’s award winning application dependency mapping (ADM) solution, to enable enterprises to become more agile in change management and data center resource optimization programs.

The Tideway virtual appliance is a pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run solution that leverages underlying hardware while eliminating the cost and time typically associated with hardware appliance installations.  Ideal for dynamic environments, the virtual appliance dramatically reduces provisioning time in a large enterprise – normally six to eight weeks for a hardware appliance – to less than one week.

The integrated solution delivers significant flexibility and agility and lowers consumption of data center resources by saving space, as well as containing power and cooling costs. It also provides scalability for large enterprise deployments and allows additional resources to be allocated as the scope of deployment grows across the enterprise.

Dan Kusnetzky, Principal Analyst and President of the Kusnetzky Group, an IT research firm, said, “The use of a pre-configured virtual appliance can help organizations dynamically allocate resources and improve server utilization based on business need to better use overall data center resources. By accelerating the time-to-value for enterprises deploying Foundation, Tideway Systems is offering the help IT administrators need in a form that they can use immediately.”

 “Tideway is the only provider to offer a best-in-class ADM solution as both a ready-to-use hardware appliance and a virtual appliance,” said Richard Muirhead, CEO and Founder of Tideway Systems.  “This dual offering demonstrates our commitment to consistently delivering product solutions that match our customer demand and maximizes their return-on-investment.”

The Tideway virtual appliance solution comes pre-built as a compressed image for both 32-bit and 64-bit environments to be run on the market leading virtualization platform, VMware ESX Server, part of VMware Infrastructure 3.