Skytap, Inc. unveiled a new Automation Pack that seamlessly enables on-premise Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Visual Studio and Testing Manager workflows to dynamically create testing environments in Skytap Cloud. The Automation Pack offers flexible support for a wide range of application development workloads, ranging from .NET client applications to complex n-tier server applications, such as SharePoint. With these capabilities, customers using TFS and Visual Studio 2012 can accelerate build-deploy-test (BDT) workflows, increase business agility, and lower costs using Skytap Cloud. The Skytap Automation Pack is software that installs on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, providing workflow automation and seamless integration with Skytap Cloud. With this solution, customers can run TFS on-premise and automatically spin-up, run, and tear down complex Microsoft development and testing environments in Skytap Cloud on-demand; dynamically provision secure VPN network connectivity between test environments in Skytap Cloud and TFS without manual intervention; create golden templates of complete test environments in Skytap Cloud using Microsoft Test Manager -- automating the creation of identical clean environments for each test pass; automatically snapshot entire test environments in Skytap Cloud to investigate and diagnose root cause of test pass failures; review consolidated test pass reports using Microsoft Test Manager and support complex testing requirements of n-tier applications with virtual test environments that are identical to production environments on-premise or in Microsoft Azure. By deploying TFS and Visual Studio workloads in Skytap Cloud, businesses can eliminate the time and effort required to provision, configure, and manage complex on-premise test environments. Customers benefit from Skytap's Intelligent Automation Platform, which offers self-service automation, team collaboration, and visibility and control capabilities not available with traditional cloud environments. For example, distributed teams of developers and testers can create and collaborate on highly parallelized testing environments. With on-demand access to Skytap Cloud, customers can scale up and quickly deploy additional environments as needed to accelerate software development and testing cycles. Users can also leverage other existing development and test tools in a hybrid cloud environment by creating secure VPN connections from on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud.

Skytap, Inc. announced the availability of pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates in the Skytap Cloud public template library. With the release, Skytap's enterprise customers gain on-demand, self-service access to Cloudera's open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, including the Cloudera Enterprise free edition, which can be used to deploy and manage physical or virtual clusters of up to 50 nodes. Skytap's Cloudera Hadoop templates are ideal for enterprise developers, testers, data scientists and IT professionals who are interested in quickly learning more about Hadoop, experimenting with its capabilities, and developing proof-of-concepts for big data offerings. Using Skytap Cloud's multi-VPN capability, Skytap customers can create a secure hybrid cloud and gain added flexibility to run Hadoop cluster nodes on-premise coupled with additional Hadoop cluster nodes that run in Skytap Cloud. This enables fast, on-demand scaling of Hadoop cluster environments for periodic project needs where large datasets require additional compute, memory, storage, and networking resources. The hybrid cloud Hadoop cluster can be managed as a single, unified cluster on-premise or from within Skytap Cloud. This provides customers with a flexible option to periodically scale-out Hadoop clusters on-demand using a combination of on-premise and securely connected hybrid cloud compute resources. Customers benefit from increased speed and flexibility, and avoid the cost of purchasing additional on-premise hardware to meet peak scaling needs.

Skytap, Inc. announced that Serena Software is using Skytap Cloud to run dynamic workloads in the cloud - including its Agile software development and testing initiatives across 13 countries. The Silicon Valley-based software provider has transitioned its most dynamic workloads into Skytap Cloud, providing its IT department with a powerful solution that enables self-service for hundreds of users across multiple business units within the organization, including teams collaborating across the United States, Ukraine, and United Kingdom. As a result, Serena has shortened its software test and development cycles, streamlined its internal and external training processes, and increased the quality of its next generation software products.