Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced it was selected by TechTarget's SearchServerVirtualization as a "Best of VMworld 2012" award finalist in the public and hybrid cloud computing technologies category, marking the third consecutive year the company has been recognized at the VMworld event. This year, Skytap was selected based on its recent product innovations, including a Virtual Private PaaS offering featuring Cloud Foundry integration, as well as new hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprises looking to extend their existing, on-premise VMware environments to an enterprise class cloud computing environment.

With Skytap, enterprise end-users are empowered to extend their existing on-premise virtualized infrastructure with complete virtualized private data centers connected securely in Skytap Cloud. The Skytap Intelligent Automation Platform™ provides automation and self-service capabilities that make complex cloud environments simple, easy, and intuitive. Skytap customers benefit from on-demand provisioning of complex computing environments, advanced software defined networking, global team collaboration, and secure remote access to VMs via SmartClient™ technology using any modern browser or native RDP client. In addition, IT administrators maintain full security control, access policy management, and visibility similar to their existing on-premises computing resources, including monitoring, usage quotas, automated notifications and real-time reporting.

More than 200 enterprises use Skytap Cloud for development and testing, virtual technical training, and software demonstrations and evaluations. Specifically, these user groups benefit from:

• Development and Testing: Skytap allows development and test teams to import their existing applications, tools and processes unchanged into the Skytap Cloud or select from a public library of more than 100 popular software titles. Software development teams can create complex environments with hundreds of virtual machines and multiple networks, gain desktop access to VMs without exposing them on the public Internet. Additionally, these teams can suspend and resume multi-VM environments in seconds, run multiple environments in parallel, and publish secure shared desktop access to complete environments using a simple publish URL capability.
  
  
• Virtual Technical Training: Skytap Cloud empowers training managers to take their existing instructor led classroom environments to the cloud in minutes without requiring any application rewrites. With Skytap, training managers can centrally manage all virtual classroom environments, student and trainer access, usage, and security policies. Trainers can also remotely view and connect to any student virtual machine to utilize an 'over the shoulder' view for an enhanced interactive virtual learning experience.
  
  
• Software Demos and Evaluations: Skytap Cloud empowers geographically distributed sales teams with self-service cloud-based software demos and evaluation environments that provide frictionless customer collaboration, resulting in shorter sales cycles and more closed business. With Skytap, sales engineers can instantly build, customize and deploy a demonstration environment in seconds, create and share unlimited copies of their software demonstration environments globally, save these environments as re-usable templates, and conduct multiple software demonstrations or proof-of-concepts in parallel without resource scheduling constraints or concerns.
  

"Being selected as a Best of VMworld award winner for the third consecutive year is great validation of Skytap's continued product innovation and leadership in enterprise cloud computing," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap. "However, the real proof of our success is the increased business agility, reduced time to market, and increased speed of doing business that over 200 forward thinking enterprise customers are achieving with Skytap Cloud today."

This award marks the fourth major accolade received by Skytap in 2012, including being recognized as SearchServerVirtualization.com's 2011 Product of the Year and the WTIA Commercial Product of the Year, and being named to the AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 list for the third consecutive year.

For a free, 14-day full-access trial of Skytap Cloud, visit www.skytap.com.