UShareSoft today launched two new products "UForge Appliance Factory", allowing IT professions to easily assemble software appliances; and "Open Appliance Studio" a framework for automatically deploying solutions in the field. Together these products provide a unique alternative in the field for building and assembling optimized technology stacks for agile virtual datacenter and cloud offerings.

UForge Appliance Factory: a flexible way to visually design and build software appliances

Today, UShareSoft is launching UForge Appliance Factory, which allows IT professionals to create, re-use, clone and maintain a complete software stack in a simple, consistent and predictable manner. UShareSoft's portfolio of enterprise-class tools dramatically simplifies the delivery of software to physical, virtualized and cloud environments including Amazon or to VMware vCenter for both scale-up and scale-out computing.

"Software appliances, over time can considerably reduce engineering costs while significantly speeding time to value for end users," said Brett Waldman, research analyst, System Software at IDC.

UForge Enterprise Edition: on-premise appliance factory

UShareSoft also provides UForge Enterprise Edition. This is an on-premise version of the company's own platform, available for enterprise customers who wish to have their own factory for building software appliances.

"France Telecom is currently testing UForge Enterprise Edition and Open Appliance Studio. These products are a promising solution for managing (creating, deploying and maintaining) virtual machine appliances. We anticipate a number of advantages including the independence of image format, the ability to include our own software as well as control of the governance processes." said Alexandre Lefebvre, Group Leader, Orange Labs R&D.

Until now, creating optimized stacks has been by and large done manually, that is error-prone, time consuming and requires dedicated expertise. Compounded by the economic crisis, the IT industry is having to do more with less; adding pressure to teams to deliver more in a shorter time frame.

UForge's unique features include:

Open Appliance Studio: a new era of predictable and consistent software deployments

With Open Appliance Studio, UShareSoft enables users to turn an existing software stack into a vApp. This allows ISVs to better differentiate their products from the competition through the ability to deliver self contained multi-node offerings that can be deployed in minutes to any cloud.

"UShareSoft vApps is a new paradigm in delivering fully pre-configured multi-tier appliances. It is now possible to deliver a fully integrated BI solution within a single package including Talend ETL pre-integrated with other BI components. Furthermore with multi-OS support, UForge is a very attractive platform for partners and customers" said Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder at Talend, a recognized market leader in open source data integration.

UShareSoft Partner Program

UShareSoft also offers a specific partner program for open source communities. This program allows open source project members to gain access to a UForge Community account, with the ability to publish their open source projects into UForge's Open Source Catalogue. UShareSoft has already signed a partnership deal with OW2, enabling OW2 projects to easily make their software ready for the cloud.

"We are very excited to have our first OW2 Community vApps now available for download" said Cedric Thomas, OW2 CEO.

UShareSoft is now growing its partner network with ISVs, System Integrators and Cloud Providers. "Multiplying our strategic partnerships and developing a large community of users are key objectives for us over the coming months" said Thomas Debru, UShareSoft CEO.

Availability

Register for FREE to UForge Appliance Factory. UShareSoft provides a "Starter" account for free to any developers or IT professionals as well as a full feature free Community account to open source project committers.