I've been following Egenera for quite some time now, and I recently had a chance to catch up with their VP of sales and marketing, John Humphreys.  I took the opportunity to ask a few questions and find out a little more about the company's cloud management solution, Cloud Suite.

John Humphreys:  Absolutely, Egenera Cloud Suite is a complete cloud provisioning and management solution that transforms static infrastructure into flexible cloud services to provide near-instant access to the computing resources users require.  It was designed to support business and mission-critical applications as well as test, development and less-demanding environments.

VMblog:  How does the Egenera Cloud Suite differ from other solutions on the market?

Humphreys:  With its ability to dynamically provision physical as well as virtual servers from one management framework, Egenera Cloud Suite lets companies run databases and performance-intensive applications that are not typically virtualized. This means they can support the full breadth of applications they need while still retaining the flexibility and automation that cloud services provide. Other cloud provisioning solutions expect a virtualized environment only, which limits the types of applications that can be run in the cloud.

In addition, Egenera Cloud Suite is an open solution, letting companies select the hardware and hypervisor technology that best fits their environment. Egenera Cloud Suite has an extremely powerful but simple to implement approach to high availability and disaster recovery, which allow an organization's most mission critical applications to run in the cloud.

VMblog:  How do IT organizations and service providers benefit from using Egenera Cloud Suite?

Humphreys:  Egenera Cloud Suite is a complete cloud provisioning and management suite that makes it simple to design, request, provision, price, support and manage cloud services. It has unique features to support service providers who want to offer cloud services, such as multi-channel cost, margin and pricing capabilities. Cloud Suite also features a drag and drop designer that lets IT or users design exactly the computing environment they need, in a simple way.

VMblog:  What do you see happening in the cloud management market today?

Humphreys:  Driven by ever-increasing business demand, cloud computing has become part of many organizations' IT strategy today. In fact, an IDC survey found data center managers expect to allocate nearly 50 percent of their budgets to running services in the cloud (public, private and hybrid) in 2013.  The cloud has become the primary driving force in new technology adoption. It is changing the enterprise, by allowing individuals, departments and groups to create customized computing environments, especially suited to their needs. It has also freed the resources of the IT department while empowering them to provide better service. On the service provider and ISV side, cloud computing is having an enormous effect on their business models, and enables them to compete in new ways that drive revenue. Driving this transition is the need to provide users with more immediate access to computing resources and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) through greater automation and elasticity of services.

VMblog:  Any final thoughts you'd like to share with VMblog readers?

Humphreys:  The cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution.  Many organizations choose to implement some form of hybrid cloud model, with services being consumed from both on-premise and off-premise solutions. Egenera Cloud Suite helps to build hybrid cloud environments that allow organizations to implement and manage a flexible, manageable, and highly available cloud service to support the range of applications that businesses depend on and we do so while delivering high availability and DR out of the box.

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Once again, I'd like to thank John Humphreys, VP of sales & marketing at Egenera, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.