Service Automates the Building of Proof of Concept Deployments

One of the more frustrating things about acquiring new technology is the time and effort that goes into the proof of concept. Nobody knows for sure whether the product under review is actually going to work in their environment and a lot of time and effort is about to be expended to find out.

But a new approach to deploying a proof-of-concept project using a cloud computing platform may change all that. CloudShare, formerly known as IT Structures, is rolling out today a cloud computing service that allows software vendors to develop a working custom demonstration of their application for a customer without having to set up IT infrastructure at the customer’s site.

Instead, the vendor takes advantage of virtualizaton and the automated provisioning tools developed by CloudShare to deploy a working demonstration that mirrors the customer’s IT environment on top of the CloudShare service. For customers, this eliminates the need to host engineers from vendors on their site, while for the vendor the service eliminates the need to pay travel expenses for engineers to transport IT infrastructure in order to set up a proof of concept demonstration at the customer’s site.

While vendors have been using the Web to show canned demonstrations of the software for years, CloudShare takes the concept one step further by leveraging on-demand cloud computing infrastructure to create custom demonstrations. For customers, this service could greatly shorten the new technology evaluation process, while allowing vendors to address a bigger potential customer base without having to hire additional field sales engineers.

Services included the CloudBurst offering include workflow capabilities, monitoring tools, white boards and screen sharing.