As companies work to stretch their IT resources and maximize under-provisioned IT assets, virtualization is coming to the forefront. Though several vendors have stepped up their virtualization offerings to the market, a void remains in the undeveloped area of managing those virtualized environments and devices once they are in place. Currently, writing custom scripts is a common process for companies to manage the complex, disparate, and heterogeneous virtualized systems. ToutVirtual, with its VirtualIQ suite of products to manage heterogeneous virtual computing infrastructures (cross platform and multi-tier), plans to automate and simplify this management process.

ToutVirtual's solution enables businesses to reduce the total cost of ownership of their virtual computing platforms and infrastructure. ToutVirtual allows organizations to obtain a holistic view of their virtual infrastructure and control it based on top-level business policy objectives.

Our mission is to deliver policy based IT automation solutions for the successful deployment of enterprise-wide virtualization.

According to Tim Grieser, program vice president for system management software at analyst firm IDC, "The rapid spread of virtualization on Intel architecture platforms is increasing the need for software tools to effectively manage these environments. Multi-function tools that can manage across a variety of environments, such as VirtualIQ from ToutVirtual, are increasingly needed by IT to monitor and control their virtualized resources." Grieser added, "This type of software provides leverage so that IT can efficiently manage the increasing complexity of virtualized infrastructures and virtual machines."

According to William Fellows, principal analyst, The 451 Group, "We don't see anyone else with such fine-grained virtual machine (VM) management at this point."

According to Stephen Elliot, director at analyst firm IDC, "Where the complications happen [in virtualization] are with management, the staff impact, and the process changes that take place." Elliot added, "There’s definitely an addressable need that these guys [ToutVirtual] are trying to fill."

According to Joe Clabby, president, Clabby Analytics, "For small and mid-sized businesses that have failed to adopt virtualization due to cost, complexity, and proof issues, this [ToutVirtual] design may be just the ticket to get them to experiment with systems virtualization."

According to Rachel Chalmers, senior analyst for enterprise software group, The 451 Group, "Like ToutVirtual, we see a future of heterogeneous virtualization platforms - both bare-metal hypervisors from VMware, the Xen open source project and (eventually) Microsoft, and operating-system-hosted virtualization from Microsoft, Sun, SWsoft and VMware. IT operators and systems administrators are going to want platform-neutral, performance aware management tools to run across all these. ToutVirtual is already selling one."