Skytap Leadership at Upcoming Industry Events

In the coming months, Skytap leadership will be attending a number of industry events, including Agile 2013, VMworld, Camp IT, and STARWEST. The Skytap team will be providing live demonstrations of Skytap Cloud, including how our software is used by enterprise customers for development and testing, software demonstrations and evaluations, and virtual training environments. Agile

While the Principles of Agile are Simple, Making it Reality is Hard

To create great software, companies are using Agile development. But while the principles of Agile development are simple, transforming it into reality can be hard due to obstacles like costs, large teams, one-size-fits-all architecture, resource constraints, old technology—and the list goes on. To achieve Agile development, teams require elastic, dynamic, scalable, automated, self-service infrastructures. Many

Accelerate DevOps with Hybrid Cloud

​In my previous blog, Combining DevOps with Agile Development, I discussed the state of DevOps and the need to incorporate Agile Development—concluding that while DevOps and Agile development were a great fit, a hybrid cloud was the third piece of the puzzle to help the enterprise accelerate the pace of software development, deployment, and innovation.

Time. Development and Test Teams Never Have Enough of it.

Leading software companies are discovering that leveraging the cloud for development and test can slash both cycle times and costs by enabling dev/test teams to quickly spin up multiple development stacks and test environments on demand. This type of agile environment is proving particularly beneficial to IT teams that are also tasked with support of

Remote Collaboration in the Modern Technology Enterprise

Remote collaboration has become an essential part of the modern technology enterprise, but without the right tools it can be a real pain. When coding, troubleshooting, teaching someone a graphical application—or anything else you do—it seems so much easier if you and your partners are looking at the same thing side by side. Posting log

The Best of 2013 (So Far)

As we pass the midpoint of 2013, we’re revisiting the most popular content on the Skytap blog. Across the cloud computing industry as a whole, people wrote about things like why application development is better in the cloud, the different value propositions of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions, and the variety of concerns relating

With Cloud Computing, Every Minute Counts

Benjamin Franklin coined the enduring phrase ‘Time is money.’ That was more than 2 centuries ago and it is particularly apt when describing cloud computing today. A defining characteristic of cloud computing—whether public, private, or hybrid—is its self-service nature. Computing resources are delivered on demand and end users pay based on their consumption levels, which

User Support Series: Network Address Translation

In this edition of the User Support Series, we’ll take a look at the documentation for Skytap Cloud’s new Network Address Translation (NAT) functionality.​ As described in the blog piece Dynamic Network Management by Seth Payne, NAT makes it easy to connect many networks together without having to worry about subnet overlaps. Of course, before

Big Data: Extracting Simplicity From the Complex

Scientific researchers, financial analysts, and pharmaceutical firms have long-used incredibly large datasets to answer incredibly complex questions. Large datasets, especially when analyzed in tandem with other sets, can reveal patterns and relationships that would otherwise remain hidden. In this sense, big data analysis is similar to a microscope or telescope. Big data makes visible those

Dev/Test: A 5-Step Process for Tuning out the Cloud Hype

Over the past few years it would have been hard to miss the slow and systematic outsourcing of certain parts of corporate IT. The primary solution has been cloud computing—which, of course, means the market is flush with cloud providers—and a lot of hype. With so many options to choose from, it becomes even more

Q & A at STAREAST in Florida

The Skytap team had a great time in Orlando this past week at STAREAST. We had a chance to meet and speak with hundreds of professionals about software testing, tools, and technology. Over the two-day EXPO, we talked a lot about how Skytap helps with testing and application lifecycle management. Here are highlights from two

Think You Can’t Control the Cloud? Think Again.

In a recent article for ReadWriteWeb, Matt Asay talks about the very real need for IT to have security and control without becoming a bottleneck. From the article: It’s hard to believe, but just 10 years ago open source was considered “communist,” an anti-American cancer and the terror of corporate legal departments everywhere. Now, as