HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid IT management, today announced HotLink Cloud Management Express, which extends VMware vCenter capabilities so companies can easily unify the administration and management of both public and private cloud resources in one streamlined, tightly integrated solution that works out of the box. HotLink Cloud Management Express provides public cloud support for Microsoft Azure, vCloud Air, OpenStack and Amazon EC2, and on-premises support for OpenStack, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM.

Most enterprise roadmaps are now hybrid, with analyst firm IDC predicting that more than 65 percent of enterprise IT departments will commit to hybrid cloud before 2016. Key drivers are reduced cost, increased agility and faster time to market. To realize those benefits, corporate IT must architect for the management of diverse internal and external IT infrastructures without increasing operational complexity or IT staff. Moreover, enterprises are concerned about avoiding cloud vendor lock-in within a market that is changing rapidly. Their hybrid cloud management and operational platforms require the flexibility to plug-and-play with a spectrum of cloud alternatives together with existing on-premise virtual infrastructure.

“Hybrid cloud solutions are critical for enterprises to embrace IT-as-a-Service. But, hybrid management can introduce considerable operational complexity for corporate IT,” said Kenneth Owens, CTO of Cloud Infrastructure Services, Cisco Systems, Inc. “By utilizing best-of-breed technology from Cisco and HotLink, customers realize maximum business value from private and public clouds without adding integration or management complexity. We are partnering with HotLink so our mutual Intercloud customers can benefit from a streamlined hybrid IT solution in a hybrid cloud environment.”

Built on HotLink’s patented transformation technology, HotLink Cloud Management Express provides an intuitive, single point of administration, monitoring, management and automation, extending VMware vCenter Server to deliver the industry’s most streamlined hybrid cloud management platform. In addition, the new solution enables companies to leverage existing VMware vCenter-compatible tools and workflows, such as orchestration, self-service portals, PowerCLI scripts and automation across hybrid resources. IT teams can deploy HotLink Cloud Management Express in under two hours without requiring specialized skills or a protracted and costly system integration project.

“Like many IT shops, we have a mix of VMware on-premise and public cloud computing resources,” said Bernd Harzog, CEO of OpsDataStore. “We chose HotLink to unify management of our hybrid IT infrastructure because it gives us the ability to utilize the robustness of VMware vCenter and easily extend it to cloud-based platforms. We like that the HotLink solution is so tightly integrated into vCenter, simple to deploy and really intuitive to use.”

Additional capabilities of HotLink Cloud Management Express include:

• Auto-discovery of cloud-based resources spanning on- and off-premise -- for easy and automated addition of hybrid resources to the VMware vCenter inventory tree;
• Fine-grained monitoring and performance data -- provides unified and consistent management and analytics across disparate resource types;
• Support for power operations and VM console access -- so users can easily manage a range of cloud-based workloads with a single point of administration;
• Ability to edit workload properties and provision from native templates -- to eliminate the need for multiple administrative consoles across hybrid resources;
• Hybrid alarms, alerts and change management -- for a single point of operational management across all cloud resources; and
• Unified permissions and security management -- to provide consistent and traceable access controls across hybrid platforms.

Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink, said, “HotLink has been singularly focused on streamlining the management of hybrid environments since the company’s beginning, and our transformation technology is unique in enabling VMware vCenter to natively interoperate with other platforms. The launch of HotLink Cloud Management Express takes this to the next level, supporting the largest spectrum of on- and off-premise resources of any hybrid management solution. Customers can now select their cloud provider of choice without worrying about integration and management complexities.”

HotLink Cloud Management Express is available immediately with pricing at $175 per workload per year for 150 workloads.