Today at VMworld 2011, Electric Cloud, the smart development cloud company, announced that ElectricCommander 4.0, the latest version of its enterprise-class automation solution, will integrate with VMware vCloud Director 1.5 to enable smart development clouds. Brian Lillie, Equinix CIO, and Martin Van Ryswyk, Electric Cloud VP of engineering, will present “Beyond the Cloud Hype” (Session CIM2628) at VMworld 2011 today discussing how Equinix implemented a smart development cloud to accelerate its software development and test cycle. The session is at 5:30 p.m. today.

With this integration, Electric Cloud and VMware jointly address the challenges both development and IT face by providing a smart development cloud solution that automates development on top of cloud infrastructure. ElectricCommander automates the entire build-test-deploy process with an intuitive workflow automation solution, executing the operations and coordinating hand-offs between teams. ElectricCommander integrates seamlessly with VMware vCloud Director 1.5, allowing IT to automate the setting up, configuring and tearing down of virtual machines as they are needed to improve cloud resource utilization and eliminate VM sprawl.

“The constantly fluctuating resource demands of software development make it an ideal fit for the cloud, but without automation it’s not enough,” said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO. “By pairing the end-to-end automation of ElectricCommander with VMware vCloud Director’s superior cloud resource management, we can enable smart development clouds that support the ‘bursty’ nature of development, giving developers ready access to resources as they are needed, and automating the entire build-test-deploy cycle for faster, smarter development.”

ElectricCommander provides increased visibility into resource usage, providing IT with the information they need to optimize resources. For developers, a smart development cloud powered by ElectricCommander and VMware vCloud Director means automated development that allows faster iterations and continuous integration throughout the build-test-deploy process. Ultimately, customers enjoy faster time to market and improved software quality.

“ElectricCommander and VMware vCloud Director work hand-in-hand to enable application development on the cloud,” said Dan Chu, vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Services, VMware. “Taken together, they optimize self-service and elasticity for developers, and comprehensive resource management for IT.”

Equinix Implements Smart Development Cloud For Equinix, a provider of global data center services, ElectricCommander and VMware vCloud Director have proven to be the solution to challenges including error-prone manual processes, disconnected development environments and manual hand-offs between teams. Equinix implemented a smart development cloud supported by ElectricCommander and VMware vCloud Director that tightly couples the development process to its internal “private” cloud infrastructure.

Implementing a smart development cloud with ElectricCommander and VMware vCloud Director has allowed Equinix to create development workflows that enable its software developers to automatically provision resources for both development and test environments. Multiple projects now share a common development framework and the same private cloud infrastructure, while retaining unique processes and tool integrations as needed. This smart development cloud also enables resources to scale for peak usage and allows multiple tests to be run in parallel.

“Electric Cloud and VMware have allowed us to create a smart development cloud that reduced our time to execute development and IT infrastructure processes from hours down to minutes, reduced environment set-up from a week to two hours, and reduced our errors to almost zero,”

said Equinix CIO Brian Lillie. “Our smart development cloud has also increased visibility and transparency throughout the development process, and allowed our team to better collaborate and more fully align to reach our common goals as one integrated team.”