ITKO's Chief Geek: 'A Dev Test Cloud Is a Wonderful Thing'

Recently at the Cloud Expo 2010 show in Santa Clara, Calif., TMC’s (News - Alert) Erin Harrison had a chance to sit down and talk with iTKO’s Chief Geek and founder, that’s what it says on the business card folks, John Michelsen. He said his company takes the software development process and makes it “faster, easier, cheaper and higher quality.”

His company was founded in 1999, with the goal of dealing with issues in software today, “like increased complexity, cycle times, the pressure to reduce.” There’s a lot going on in software development today, more than civilians would understand, and Michelsen said the cloud itself is just part of the equation.

It makes sense for iTKO to come to an event like Cloud Expo, Michelsen said. “We’re in the development and testing space. We focus exclusively on how applications are built and deployed, to production, within enterprises, our typical customers. Cloud,” he said, adding that it “is wonderful for development and testing. What we call a ‘dev test’ cloud is a wonderful thing.”

The good news, he explained, what clouds do, is they give you rapid provisioning. With a full optimized dev test lab, “you can be ready in minutes. And the same thing is true with capacity. “Our customers often don’t know what kind of hardware they need,” back at the beginning of the project, he said, so “the elasticity of the cloud is a fantastic thing to use in dev and test clouds.”