Surgient Looks to Jump Start Cloud Computing

Priced at $50,000, the Surgient offering is intended to provide a turnkey set of systems management tools that automate the provisioning of virtual servers across large-scale cloud computing deployments, said Brian Wilson, Surgient vice president of services and support.

The issue that many large-scale IT organizations are facing is that as the number of virtual servers that need to be deployed continues to escalate, they don’t have enough people on hand to accomplish that task. As a result, they will need to increasingly rely on next-generation IT automation tools because they simply can’t afford to keep hiring more systems managers, or the scripts they have in place today were never designed to handle thousands of virtual machines that can change daily.

Overall, Wilson notes, IT organizations are being asked to be more agile than ever without significantly increasing their costs, which is why interest in IT automation tools is on the rise even though some IT professionals are wary of tools that they think might threaten their jobs.

The price tag for Cloud Express, which is available now, comes with all the documentation and services from Surgient needed to create a cloud computing environment with thousands of virtual machines, said Wilson.