White Paper: The 451 Group Analyst Research Cloud Automation

Software development organizations within ISVs and large enterprises have mainly been left to their own devices to administer and maintain their development and test environments. Due to their technically self-sufficient user base, their essentially dynamic nature and the sheer cost and labor of organizing them, development and test environments have escaped the rigor with which production environments are scrutinized and tuned.

Virtualization technology stands to radically change this situation for the better and provide time, cost and personnel savings to software development organizations. This report focuses on test lab automation, which uses virtualization technology to bring manageability to development and testing as well as other dynamic workload environments.