Skytap revealed its vision for the next generation of offerings that harness the power of virtualized infrastructure. The company has announced limited availability of its offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, a virtual lab automation solution available as an on-demand service over the Web. The company, formerly known as illumita, has also changed its name to Skytap.

“Skytap provides customers with cloud-based services that enable them to capitalize on the wave of virtualization technology sweeping the industry,” said Scott Roza, chief executive officer of Skytap. “Cloud computing is gaining traction because a growing percentage of companies are demanding solutions that deliver value quickly, scale with business need, and don’t have the risk of an in-house implementation. Skytap’s Virtual Lab, which combines cloud-based virtualized infrastructure with an industry leading lab automation application, has tremendous potential to improve the timely delivery of quality applications to the business while increasing lab efficiency and lowering cost.”

Skytap’s Skytap Virtual Lab is a virtual lab solution available as a service over the Web. It enables application development and test teams to provision lab infrastructure on demand (including servers, software, networking and storage) and utilize a virtual lab management application to automate the set-up, testing, and tear down of complex, multi-tiered environments. It also gives distributed teams the capability to collaborate and rapidly resolve software defects using a virtual lab and virtual project environment.

“Virtualization is poised to become the defining technology of the 21st century,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm voke. “The market opportunity of virtualized solutions is enormous, as are the benefits virtualization delivers to an organization. Skytap’s introduction of virtual lab automation as a SaaS [Software as a Service] offering provides a flexible entry point to the exciting world of virtualization.”

Skytap’s existing customers include Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Systems Integrators (SIs) and test outsourcing firms, mid-size companies, and departments within global enterprises that want the immediate benefits that Skytap’s virtual lab service provides. “We’ve been using Skytap’s service for several months and have been impressed with its capabilities and the significant productivity gains our team has experienced from Skytap’s virtual lab technology,” said Eric Blankenburg, CTO of Resolute. “The Skytap solution enables us to quickly scale up our lab infrastructure to meet our tight development deadlines and provides our global application development team with the tools and platform they need to test and ship our products on time.”

“As a company that delivers both software products and consulting services to clients, we are constantly facing situations where we need dynamic lab environments that we can spin up quickly,” said Clay Roach, president of J9 Technologies, another early customer of the Skytap solution. “Skytap Virtual Lab has given us the capability to rapidly bring lab resources online regardless of whether the team is working on-site or off-site. This has given us a significant competitive advantage and an ability to expand our business with new customer solutions and services.”

Skytap announced limited availability of its virtual lab solution to new customers. Customers accepted into the program will receive full access to Skytap Virtual Lab capabilities, including the following:

• Virtual Infrastructure On Demand
• Automated Set-Up and Tear-Down of Environments
• Skytap Library
• Collaboration in a Virtual Environment

In conjunction with the launch of the company’s product offering, Skytap also announced a name change. Formerly known as illumita, the company has changed its name to Skytap, which better reflects the utility, cloud-based solutions the company provides.