Skytap, the leading provider of on-demand Environments-as-a-Service, today announced several new features to its Skytap Cloud solution that allow globally dispersed dev/test teams to copy on-demand environments to different regions, and set cloud usage quotas to more effectively manage cloud consumption. As software continues to drive a competitive advantage for a growing number of enterprises, these features enable companies to deliver higher quality software faster than ever before.

Today’s large-scale enterprises look to a follow-the-sun global delivery model to optimize their software development resources and accelerate time-to-market. Enterprises employing this approach can work around the clock with teams handing off work from one time zone to another as the sun rises, thereby doubling, or tripling daily production. However, this workflow is difficult to achieve as it’s often eclipsed by increased coordination costs and the inability for teams to collaborate in real-time or share application environments due to their complexity.

“The addition of Skytap’s copy to region capability immediately solves the fundamental obstacle in achieving follow-the-sun software development—the ability to quickly pass exact replicas of complex environments back and forth,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “By removing the pain of accessing centrally located environments, Skytap enables enterprises to immediately increase the productivity of their globally dispersed teams.”

Skytap’s series of new enterprise-ready management suite features include:

Copy to Region

Skytap’s copy to region feature allows dev/test teams to follow-the-moon when they’re done for the night. No matter how complex the application, it can be cloned and shared to another data center that is closest to the next team in the software development lifecycle. Once shared, that team can then follow-the-sun first thing in the morning as they are automatically working with the latest environment needed to move the project forward.

Departmental Quotas and Chargebacks

With this release, Skytap now offers IT the ability to set quotas at the departmental level and an easy way to apply chargebacks for global cloud dev/test lab consumption. Skytap’s customers have historically used quotas to decrease infrastructure costs by controlling utilization and to generate user-level usage reports. Departmental quotas take things a step further to enable the simplified and scalable rollout of dev/test labs to global teams across different lines of business, and reduce the administrative overhead to guarantee quota to those groups of users.