CloudShare Session at Cloud Expo

CloudShare, formerly IT Structures, has come out of stealth today with marquee customers and a proven cloud-based technology platform for sales engineers and trainers. CloudShare customers have already delivered over one million VM demo, PoC (proof of concept) and training hours to date, representing over six quarters of consecutive double-digit usage growth for CloudShare. This early success demonstrates the practical, revenue-oriented, immediately useful nature of the CloudShare platform.

CloudShare's platform gives solution providers and ISVs selling software or appliances a simple way to deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing fully built hands-on demo or training environment in the cloud, in minutes versus the days or weeks typically associated with on-site delivery of such enterprise-class systems.

Much like WebEx and Salesforce.com, CloudShare's SaaS solution requires no software to be installed on-site, and presents a business-oriented web dashboard as a way of controlling and interacting with the sophisticated technology of cloud computing.

"CloudShare stands out for their focus on business use and their promise to reduce cost and risks associated with the enterprise software sales process," said Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group. "CloudShare's ability to create multiple enterprise-class environments in minutes lets customers 'try before they buy' while providing ISVs with insight on customer behavior and channel activities."

User benefits to CloudShare include faster sales cycles, rapid delivery of training, and increased channel visibility. CloudShare has attracted customers like SAP, Cisco, VMware and Websense, who are currently using the platform to support their direct and channel sales and training needs.

"VMware puts great emphasis on giving customers a significant return on their IT investment and creates strategic partnerships with leading vendors to achieve this," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. "With its unique capabilities and support for native VMware virtualization and the VMware vCloud(TM) API, we see the CloudShare platform as an attractive technology that strengthens, supports and extends our ecosystem."

Notable functionality of CloudShare includes extensive workflow, hierarchical access and analytic monitoring capabilities, which provide sales and training owners with unprecedented visibility into customer use, direct sales, and channel activities. Additionally, CloudShare's patented high-speed environment creation process lets users create new replicas in minutes, while its built-in collaborative whiteboarding, screensharing, and self-service capabilities enable corporate users to create and share their own prototypes and environments.

"CloudShare is collaboratively leveraging and extending cloud infrastructure for sales, sales engineering, and training in the same way that Salesforce.com leveraged database and web technologies for CRM," said Zvi Guterman, CEO of CloudShare. "Our customers have moved from experimenting with simple hosted QA labs on public clouds, to using us to turn their existing complex IT environments into a cloud-based service. CloudShare provides a practical, business-driven solution that reduces overall capital expenses and facilitates the delivery of more products to more customers."

Founded in 2007, CloudShare is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. The team is headed by Zvi Guterman, who previously cofounded Safend, an endpoint security company.