virtualization.info: Are Surgient products real?

Are Surgient products real?

Thursday, September 21, 2006 | 4 Comments |

Surgient offers a virtual lab automation tool called VQMS (Virtual QA/Test Management System). Its only competitor, Akimbi, has been acquired in June by the virtualization market leader VMware, and its product, Slingshot, is now rebranded as Virtual Lab Manager, with an expected beta launch for October. Since Surgient currently is the only virtualization company which doesn't provide a direct way to download a trial version of its software, virtualization.info asked for an evaluation copy or a webcasted live demo of the company products since 6 months. So far virtualization.info always received a request to wait for the new product release (5.0), planned for May 2006 (as older versions of the Virtualization Industry Roadmap reported until the delay reached 1 month). At at today virtualization.info still has never tried any product from the company and it's still waiting for a communication for the new release, assuming it's still delayed. But surprisingly today InfoWorld published a review of the new VQMS 5.0, rating it 8/10 (Very Good). The appearence of this review is pretty strange also because at the moment of writing Surgient didn't release an official announcement about the availability of its 5.0 version (a strange behaviour for a company which usually issues an official annoucement for every single webcast it hosts), but already linked the InfoWorld review on its homepage. The real value of the review is also questionable since InfoWorld hosts since months a virtualization blog completely edited by David Marshall, Senior Architect at Surgient. The VQMS 5.0 review has been written by another writer but a link between two companies is evident. If any virtualizaton.info reader has ever seen or implemented Surgient products in his company I invite him to write a comment providing his own experience. Update: Surgient Vice President of Marketing, Erik Josowitz, has been so kind to promptly comment this article, informing company product's new release will be officially announced on October 2nd. Be sure to read his whole comment below.

Comments

Maybe you not as important as Infoworld?

By Anonymous, at Thursday, September 21, 2006 8:52:00 PM

Alessandro-

This certainly got my attention! Surgient products are certainly real. We're sorry we haven't yet sent you the review copy of the product but we still plan to do so. We've been working over the past couple of months with our early customers on implementations of the next product and learning alot about implementation and support. One of the organizations we decided to work with was Infoworld's review team and, in the process of supporting that review we realized that, as Andrew Binstock notes in his review, having someone from Surgient support the install, config and training was critical to making customer's successful. So we decided to wait a bit before sending your review copy (being long-distance and all) and others. I'm sorry we didn't clearly communicate that to you.

We are actually announcing Surgient Virtual Lab Management Applications version 5.0 on Oct 2 and have been doing pre-briefings and other work to support that announcement.

We still want you to review the product but have alot going on right now. Can we work out a date when it will work for both of us?

Please just let me know, I believe you have my direct contact info.

Best,
Erik Josowitz
VP Marketing
Surgient

By Erik Josowitz, at Thursday, September 21, 2006 9:07:00 PM

Sounds like great software, that you need expert help to install and configure to have success??? I really do not understand this company. People want to evaluate software by them selves. How can a company have a large customer base if they have to hand hold every customer.

I run into this issue a lot as well requesting software from companies, to me is usually proves they do not have a product ready for a mass market, with other words, no stable, easy to work with product.

By Anykey, at Friday, September 22, 2006 9:56:00 AM

There are actually two other groups that do the virtual lab thing that Surgient does.

Microsoft has a virtual lab offering they developed internally, that they call V-Labs. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/default.mspx

And GranitePillar www.granitepillar.com which appears to run the Microsoft Partners Online Lab site. I think they were one of the first.

By Ripstinger, at Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:55:00 AM

Post a new comment