Univa UD announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Brown joins Univa UD as vice president and general manager of data center automation. With over 20 years of IT leadership experience, Brown brings a wealth of enterprise software and data center strategy expertise to Univa UD. He joins the company from Dell Computer, where he was the global leader in charge of developing Infrastructure Services solutions, most recently including Dell's initial Virtualization and Data Center Power/Cooling offerings.

"With Alex's leadership, our data center automation business is on track to exceed our goals for 2008," said Jason Liu, President and Chief Executive Officer at Univa UD. "He brings a unique mix of strategic vision and tactical leadership expertise which has already resulted in Univa UD's sharpening our focus in the crowded data center virtualization space to rest squarely on application-centric automation and virtualized application delivery."

"The opportunities before us are very substantial, and I'm thrilled to be joining the team at this key growth stage," says Brown. "With our emphasis on an integrated approach which seeks to partner with and enhance, rather than replace, existing virtualization and provisioning technologies, our Reliance product presents a unique solution to one of the most pressing problems in data center automation: ensuring fast, consistent application response on time, every time."

During his time at Dell, Brown also ran Asia-Pacific-Japan Consulting as well as his initial post at Dell leading Central United States Consulting. His previous firm, Plural, was acquired by Dell in 2002. Plural was a leading provider of Microsoft enterprise software solutions and was the Microsoft partner of the year in 1997. In addition to running the Chicago office, Brown led the development of Plural's packaged Microsoft solutions as well as founding and building the firm's original sales force.

Also joining Univa UD is Kent Purdy, who will lead product development for the data center automation division. Purdy brings more than twenty years experience in the business software industry, maintaining product focus specific to IT centric administration and management solutions for servers, distributed computing, and grid environments.

Purdy joins Univa UD from Altiris, where as senior product alliance manager he drove product strategy into partner roadmap and execution plans, a critical element of Altiris' successful competitive approach. At Altiris, Purdy managed Dell's OpenManage product line, including Dell's Client Manager for desktop and mobile management as well as their Dell Management Console server management platform. Purdy has also held lead product management positions at Platform Computing, Novell, and Citrix.

This announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches its data center automation business, anchored by its Reliance product for service-level management of application delivery environments.

Reliance enables application providers, including managed service providers and internal IT groups, to offer application performance guarantees by ensuring capacity is always there when end users need it. The product drives provisioning actions across physical and virtual infrastructures, working within an application provider's existing environment to dynamically respond to changes in load. With Reliance, providers can ensure performance agreements and SLAs are consistently met while optimizing resource utilization and minimizing operational costs.

"With the current trend toward virtualization, management vendors need to provide solutions for managing across both physical and virtual environments," said Donna Scott, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. "More and more, we find that companies are seeking architectures that will enable greater levels of agility, making it faster and easier to drive changes to the environment in order to meet business and IT priorities."

Univa UD plans to release a major upgrade for Reliance in Q3 2008 including key partner integrations.