VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced that VMware vCenter™ Operations Standard 1.0 has been named 2011 "Best of Interop," taking top honors in both the Cloud Computing & Virtualization category and the Grand Prize. The Best of Interop Award winners were announced at the 2011 Interop conference in Las Vegas.

The finalists for the 2011 Best of Interop Awards were hand-selected by award-winning editors and analysts from InformationWeek Analytics. There were more than 100 candidates for Best of Interop consideration in eight different categories.

"We are thrilled that VMware vCenter™ Operations has been recognized by the Interop judges," said Rob Smoot, director, product marketing, enterprise management, VMware. "Cloud computing is bringing about massive changes in the IT landscape, and our customers need solutions to help them transform their IT operations to achieve the economics and agility of cloud computing. VMware vCenter Operations offers a new, analytics-based approach that simplifies IT management in dynamic environments and enables infrastructure and operations teams to reduce operating costs and increase the level of service they provide to the business."

Charlie Babcock, editor at large, InformationWeek and judge for the 2011 Best of Interop Awards commented, "VMware vCenter™ Operations is another one of those products where you can see an ambitious company testing the limits of what can be done from an existing position of strength. It is a bold effort to combine the datacenter disciplines of system configuration, performance management, and capacity management into one management tool and apply them to what in the future will be referred to as the private cloud."

Best of Interop is hosted by InformationWeek Analytics. For more information on Best of Interop categories and awards, visit http://www.bestofinterop.com/.

VMware vCenter Operations
VMware vCenter Operations provides automated operations management for virtual and cloud infrastructures. Using patented analytics and powerful visualizations, VMware vCenter Operations integrates and automates performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems so that customers can proactively ensure service levels, optimize resource usage and maintain configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.