Building the Ultimate Virtual IT Playpen

Here’s an interesting question. How many more projects would chief technologists take on if both the cost and the amount of time it took to set up a proof-of-concept demonstration were virtually nil?That’s the thinking behind a new free online CloudShare Pro service being offered by CloudShare, which leverages virtualization to provide IT services companies with a platform for setting up software demonstrations.

The company wants to extend that concept out to technologists of all types that can now use the service to test any number of applications that are pre-loaded into the cloud computing platform, or can be loaded into the system by any registered user.

Kevin Epstein, CloudShare vice president of marketing, says the company is deliberately providing free access to the service as part of an effort to introduce people to a cloud computing service specifically designed to eliminate the need to set up costly on-site demonstrations of software.

CloudShare doesn’t have any ambitions to be a full-time provider of cloud computing services; its primary mission is to assist IT services companies that need to combine multiple products together to create a solution for customers.

But given the fact that the platform already exists, Epstein says CloudShare has nothing to lose, and possibly everything to gain, by giving IT people of all types a place to experiment with enterprise software at no cost to themselves.

So think about what it might mean to both you and your company if nobody had to spend any time setting up proof-of-concept demonstrations just to prove a point.