WildBlue Expands Infrastructure with Skytap's Cloud Solution

High-speed satellite broadband service provider WildBlue has picked Skytap to scale out its VMware-based infrastructure to the cloud.

 

WildBlue was able to eliminate significant bottlenecks in its provisioning process by choosing Skytap. The adoption of a cloud service for its on-demand IT environments also allowed the company to reduce infrastructure costs by more than 60 percent, and save over $1 million in upfront capital expenditures.

 

Prior to Skytap’s selection, WildBlue was facing bottlenecks with IT staging and testing environments. All these challenges delayed the release of business-critical software by up to five weeks. The company finally adopted Skytap’s cloud-based virtual lab for its IT staging and test environments.

 

WildBlue experienced immediate benefits and in less than one week they were able to access VMware platform via a self-service portal and could immediately scale testing resources on-demand. The company was also able to perform cross-platform testing of customer software and integrate with onsite Web services and applications using a ‘hybrid’ onsite/cloud model to enable end-to-end system testing.

 

Mike Casullo, CIO of WildBlue noted that many cloud providers offer proprietary platforms that don't support their VMware-based environments. But they finally discovered Skytap, its hybrid cloud/on-site approach and complete VMware platform support that gave them the flexibility to leverage their existing investments.

 

“Skytap was the only cloud service that didn't force us to make an all or nothing decision.”

 

Skytap has given good results in the testing phases, and encouraged by the success WildBlue is now using Skytap earlier in the application lifecycle as part of the requirement and design phases. WildBlue is now able to easily share early prototype demos with business stakeholders and reduce costly change requests later in the development cycle.

 

Many application test and development teams face problems when they try to get access to infrastructure when they need it, noted Deepak Puri, director, alliances, VMware. He explained that VMware vCloud partner services like Skytap that are built on the VMware platform provide quick access to cloud infrastructure that is compatible with existing internal production environments.

 

By leveraging the VMware platform, these services enable seamless deployment to production and also provide greater flexibility.