Skytap, Inc.is a American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington that provides IaaS hybrid cloud services for small to mid-size corporations. Founded in 2006, Skytap is funded by Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Openview, and the Washington Research Foundation.
The company's sole product is Skytap Cloud, a cloud computing platform that imports existing virtual machines and applications into a cloud environment. Skytap Cloud's infrastructure supports standard hypervisors, including VMware and Xen, and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and Linux. Skytap Cloud provides customization management and automation capabilities for hosted systems.
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Skytap launched a virtual lab automation solution as a cloud service [1] in April 2008. Skytap Virtual Lab provides virtual infrastructure on demand, a Web-based virtual lab management application and a pre-populated virtual machine library for creating new virtual machine configurations. Skytap offers the ability to access virtual machines from any location using a Web browser, including mobile devices such as the iPhone.[2]
Skytap introduces the concept of templates to represent one or more pre-built VM images. These templates can be very simple and contain one VM, or they can be very complex and house several. The latter case is particularly useful when you are working with applications that multiple machines (i.e. database + app server + web server). Skytap users can use the pre-built templates as well as create their own. One of the interesting ways Skytap can be used by development teams is to create templates that reproduce bugs or build breaks. Because a template can be very complex (i.e. they can house many VM's), even the most complicated deployment environment can be easily replicated.
In order to use a Skytap template, you install it into your virtual lab. This notion enables a development team to instantiate multiple instances of a single template - enabling different teams to work in parallel.
In 2008, Skytap was nominated for "Best Virtual Lab Automation"[3]
In 2009, Seattle Business Magazine chooses Skytap CEO as 2009 Top Innovator and Entrepreneur.[4]
In 2010, Skytap was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list[5]
There are several competitors to Skytap in the virtual lab automation market. Here is a list of the leading competitors: