CiRBA Inc announced that 2007 marked a year of tremendous growth in the emerging virtualization and consolidation planning software market as server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption force enterprises to take a more holistic and critical view of their data centers. CiRBA highlights from 2007 include the release of CiRBA versions 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, and 4.5, customer growth of over 130%, a new European presence, key strategic partnerships, as well as the industry’s most prestigious award recognitions.

”Virtualization and consolidation rank high as strategic priorities, as IT executives seek to reduce physical server counts and complexity within IT infrastructures,” said Gerry Smith, president and CEO of CiRBA. “Our remarkable growth over the past year shows that organizations around the world are choosing CiRBA as their technology of choice for dealing with their number one challenge in transforming their environments - planning.”

Expert accolades

CiRBA’s unique technology has garnered significant recognition within the analyst and press community, including:

CiRBA was named to Network World’s “10 Management Companies to Watch” list in October 2006 and to the publication’s “IT Management Companies Still Worth Watching” list in September 2007.

Burton Group’s Senior Analyst Chris Wolf noted: “CiRBA has yet to reach the same market share as PlateSpin, but CiRBA’s emergence as the dominant P2V planning tool is only a matter of time.”

Forrester Research Senior Analyst Evelyn Hubbert: “This is going to be something the big guys will want to have as virtualization adoption moves more aggressively into production.”

Significant customer growth

CiRBA saw a significant increase in market traction in 2007 and over the past six months in particular, with a dramatic 130% increase in its customer base. CiRBA added enterprise customers in the US, across all major industries and federal governments, and is seeing a significant demand for its software in Europe.

New European headquarters, increased global presence

In order to accommodate the industry’s growing demand for virtualization and consolidation analysis solutions and expand its global presence, CiRBA appointed a new Vice President of EMEA, Ayman Gabarin. From this London location, CiRBA will deliver a heightened level of service and support to its European customers and partners. CiRBA has also signed new resellers and services partners to reach into the South American and South African markets.

New strategic partnerships

In August, two market-leading global IT consulting services organizations standardized on CiRBA for virtualization and server consolidation analysis engagements. Through these partnerships, CiRBA will be able to rapidly scale its operation and achieve global reach. Similar agreements are under way with a number of other major regionally-focused services organizations in the North American and European markets.

Technology innovation

CiRBA has pioneered what is now considered the state of the art in virtualization and consolidation analysis software and released four significant upgrades to its product, CiRBA versions 4.0, 4.2, 4.4 and 4.5.

CiRBA’s unique multi-dimensional analysis capabilities make it easier for organizations to identify and map virtualization and consolidation opportunities, create server by server action plans, and provide pre- and post-consolidation metrics to quantify progress. With the September release of Version 4.4, CiRBA now assists in managing the complete VMware lifecycle.

Specifically, CiRBA 4.4 enables organizations to factor into their analysis the unique characteristics of VMware’s virtualization technologies, such as VMware-associated CPU overhead, and VMware-specific capabilities to further enhance the accuracy of virtualization planning. Once organizations have used CiRBA to determine optimal initial placements and cluster design, CiRBA also helps them keep environments optimized over the long term by integrating with VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Through this integration, it seamlessly creates and synchronizes rules that maintain optimal placement of virtual machines within virtualized environments.

With Version 4.5, CiRBA introduced Proactive Resource Placement capabilities that enable data center managers to make more efficient and optimized use of virtualized infrastructure. CiRBA’s Proactive Resource Placement capability advances workload planning and management by leveraging historical utilization patterns and personalities, business rules and configuration constraints to proactively place virtual machines to best serve the coming workload. Also with Version 4.5, CiRBA announced its support of Unicode enabling the organization to offer its in-depth analysis to data centers worldwide.

Industry accolades

CiRBA offers the only solution on the market to analyze all of the constraints that can make or break success in production virtualization, and continues to stand out against the competition with a string of prestigious industry award recognition and honors. Most notably, CiRBA 4.4 was recently presented with the Best of VMworld Gold Award for Capacity Planning, Consolidation Software at the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco. According to the judging process, CiRBA’s discovery and analysis combination simply surpassed the competition.

In addition, CiRBA was named a finalist in the “Best Virtualization Tool” category of the 2007 ServerWatch Product Excellence Awards. More than 1,000 ServerWatch readers voted in this category.

“While virtualization adoption is clearly on the rise, so too is the demand for technology to plan and manage it,” added Smith. “As 2008 begins, our executive team is confident that we will make our mark on a global scale—continuing product innovation, making our customers successful and expanding on our leadership position in the virtualization and consolidation planning market.”