SEATTLE, WA., June 6, 2011 -- Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced new cloud testing capabilities that leverage HP's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions. Skytap also announced integration with HP's ALM 11 suite to enable customers and HP partners to more easily leverage the cloud for comprehensive software development and testing.

"Enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud computing to reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability," said Scott Roza, CEO of Skytap. "Skytap provides a cost-effective, agile solution to accelerate the development and testing of applications. Our collaboration with HP provides customers with a best of breed solution for application development and testing that leverages HP's ALM offerings, Skytap's cloud platform, and HP partner services."

According to Gartner, Inc., organizations that want to extend the application life cycle beyond development to production environments using a consistent application model should evaluate development tools or point solutions that provide out-of-the-box integration with development build tools. Additionally, they must determine whether life cycle tools can address the needs of multiple teams (such as development and testing), while also meeting broad enterprise requirements; this will reduce costs.*

Skytap's integration with ALM 11 enables enterprise customers to access the full lifecycle of application development and testing in the cloud. Customers can now plan, build and release higher quality applications while leveraging the cloud for scalability and agility, while distributed teams can access cloud-based testing environments to enhance collaboration and sharing for rapid bug reproduction and issue resolution.

Capabilities enabled by the integration include:

• Requirements management for agile development and testing environments to be delivered in the Skytap Cloud.
• Performance, load and stress testing of applications with the dynamic scale out of cloud-based load generators from HP Load Runner to cost-effectively simulate thousands of virtual users. With this capability, customers can now fully test the performance and scalability of applications before they are deployed.
• Automated functional and regression testing utilizing HP's Quick Test Professional. This capability allows software teams to automatically set up, run, and tear down Skytap environments directly from the HP ALM interface.
• Distribute development and test workloads between on-premise private cloud and Skytap cloud environments.
• Create secure hybrid cloud architectures in under 10 minutes using Skytap's self-service user interface.
• Application security testing utilizing HP's Application Security Center that simulates cloud or on-premise based attacks.

Through this enhanced product collaboration, Skytap and HP customers, as well as HP partners, can utilize Skytap and HP ALM to meet all of their application development and pre-production testing needs in the cloud. The integration leverages several new features from Skytap including security policy management, advanced virtual data center (VDC) options and self-service hybrid clouds. These capabilities are critical in helping development and test teams cut costs by more than 70 percent, and accelerate development and deployment cycles by 75 percent or more.

"Organizations moving their applications to the cloud require a solution that allows all stakeholders across development teams to accelerate and manage application delivery," said Jonathan Rende, general manager and vice president, Applications, Software, HP. "The integration of Skytap with HP ALM gives application development teams a single tool to collaborate in the cloud, helping to further reduce application delivery cycles and significantly lower costs."

"Orasi applauds these integrations as they allow us to provide accelerated validation capabilities in a simple, self service, and solution-orientated cloud environment," said Caleb Billingsley, area vice president of Orasi, an HP partner. "This significantly reduces complexity for our customers as we help them roll out reliable, scalable, and secure business applications."

In addition to the HP ALM integration, Skytap also announced its upcoming DevOps Webinar, which takes place on June 14 at 10am PT, and features Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group.

*Gartner, Inc., Managing Between Applications and Operations: The Vendor Landscape, Ronni J. Colville & Donna Scott, April 5, 2011.

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.