VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacente, today announced that TradeBeam, Inc., a provider of supply-chain management solutions, has selected its platform, including VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Lab Manager, as the foundation for its development and production IT environments.

The company states that TradeBeam’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model provides organizations with import and export compliance, inventory management, shipment tracking, supply-chain event management, and global trade finance solutions. It also states that TradeBeam’s four international datacenters house 1,000 physical servers. The company claims that with the number of servers continuing to rise along with power consumption, space requirements, infrastructure complexity and IT costs, TradeBeam recognized that a new approach was needed to sustain the company over the long term. It adds that this realization was the impetus behind TradeBeam’s decision to virtualize its application environment, including test and development, on its platform.

”VMware is having a profound effect on our organization,” said Nasser Mirzai, IT director at TradeBeam. ”It’s helping accelerate our time to market with new applications by making our test and dev process much more nimble and efficient. It would be very difficult to get as much done as quickly with a hardware-based approach. And in our production environment, we’re much more scalable and responsive to changing business needs. New virtual machines can be set up in minutes when additional capacity is needed. From a cost perspective, we estimate that virtualization is at least 40-percent more cost-effective than a traditional approach to IT.”

”After looking at VMware Infrastructure and Microsoft Hyper-V, we felt that VMware could provide the total solution that we needed,” said Mirzai. ”Starting with OS independence, it was clear that VMware was the best fit for us. VMware provides a comprehensive set of automation and management tools so we can be more effective with fewer resources. We’ve made significant investments in the development of world-class infrastructure and management systems providing extremely cost-effective and responsive applications platform. We are an enterprise solution dealing with major clients and we needed to ensure that our partners can support us with enterprise level sales and support. We felt that VMware fit that profile to meet our objectives.”