Today, Cloudtools officially announced the launch of the company and availability of its first product, Shift, designed to revolutionize the process of moving virtual machines between cloud platforms and virtualized environments. As part of the announcement, Cloudtools also announced the opening of its headquarters in Austin, Texas, where CEO, Sam Cece will lead the team.

For system administrators that rely on virtualization, moving virtual machines (VM) from one environment to another or even from one version of a virtualization platform to a newer version is a time consuming, complicated process, which requires a never ending cycle of planning, implementing and testing that consumes engineering time and energy. Shift changes everything. Now, instead of requiring a technical team to manage VM movement, the task is as simple as "dragging and dropping" a VM from one environment to another. Shift helps engineers get back to what they do best: engineering.

"For companies relying on virtualization, you either have a problem today or you're about to," said Sam Cece, CEO of Cloudtools. "Whether you're debating about moving to the cloud or from VMware to Hyper-V, the historic process of doing so could cripple your team. But with Shift, it doesn't have to be this way. Instead, it can be simple, secure, affordable, and perfectly effective."

Shift does all the work in the background. Shift's revolution is that it makes it simple to move virtual machines between all of the most commonly used virtualization environments, including Amazon web services (AWS), VMware, Microsoft Azure, Openstack, Hyper-V, and CloudStack. Much like driving a car doesn't require a technical knowledge of automotive engineering, Shift allows for nearly anyone to be able to successfully move a machine from designated point A to point B. After creating an account, customers simply log into their current platform, select the virtual machine they want to migrate, and drag and drop it into the new environment.

Cloudtools was spun out of Virtual Bridges, Inc. when the team saw a massive market opportunity to shake up the time-consuming and difficult task of moving a virtual machine by building smart software that took the burden off administrators. Shift is the company's first product to market, and there are plans to continue to develop other products that will make virtualization professionals more efficient.

Cloudtools estimates that more than a million system administrators could benefit from Shift in the US alone. To learn more about Cloudtools and Shift, visit cloudtoolsonline.com/