Eric Courville, COO and co-founder of VM6 Software 

Can you briefly tell us a little bit about what VM6 Software has been up to in the past year? 

VM6  Software (VM6) originally began as a consulting business, with its focus on server virtualization. The company was founded in 2004 and the first two years of the company were focused on developing the first generation software, which was originally based on VMware. VM6 was self- funded, with all the proceeds that came from the consulting firm being reinvested into developing the software. When we first took our first generation software to market, the feedback we got was that the solution was too complex because it needed a SAN and the customers we were targeting didn’t have VMware expertise.  They found the product too complex to implement.
 
With this feedback, we took our product back into development for another two years and the first version of our new product was released in September 2009, which worked off the Microsoft platform and required no shared storage. With this release, we also sold the professional services side of VM6, changed our company from a consulting company to an ISV and renamed ourselves VM6 Software. 

This past year has been focused on securing financing (which we received $4M in Series A financing from RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners), growing our sales and marketing teams and fine tuning our go to market strategy. 

VM6 Software recently announced VM6 VMex 2.1, what can you tell us about this new release? 

VM6 VMex 2.1 featured some enhancements to our product that had been requested by our partners and customers. Key new features include: 

• High availability and storage recovery enhancement:  Includes a multi-array hub-witness that improves protection against unexpected crashes caused by power outages of entire sites. This also eliminates the need for manual intervention, which is required by competitive products to respond to certain crash scenarios.
• Simplified event monitoring:  Sends VM6 VMex 2.1 administrators event monitoring via e-mail. The configuration and management of alerts is now more integrated than in any other product on the market.
• Storage-integrated dashboard:  Fully integrated dashboard inside the storage virtualization manager section provides all the information administrators need to understand the state of any storage virtualization object.
• Virtual desktop session manager:  Management interface enables the monitoring of VDI sessions and includes a fully integrated dashboard, allowing users to view session state or reset sessions.

Would you consider VM6 VMex 2.1 to be the only all-in-one solution of its kind? 

Definitely. While we do compete in the virtualization space, our solution offers a virtual SAN, high availability, a VDI broker and a management/monitoring console all in one product. No other solution combines the four solutions that we feature into one product. 

What does the pricing structure look like? 

VM6 VMex starts as low as $1,000 for a single server (for test and development) to $4,000 per server for enterprises with multiple sites. 

What channels are being used to sell VM6 VMEX 2.1? 

We are channel focused. All our sales are worked with and through partners. We just recently announced the launch of our global partner program, looking for value added resellers (VARS) and systems integrators (Sis) who focus on virtualization solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. 

For the technologist who is reading this, who enjoys “the deep dive”, what is it that you can tell us that he/she would really appreciate about your product? 

The technologist will appreciate the ease of installing and operating VM6 VMex. The fact that the management portion is built on the Microsoft Management Console makes it highly portable. It is very simple but everything in the application can be tweaked using our proprietary user interface. The command line lets you script any operation accessible from the console. VM6 VMex comes with its own communication protocol based on TCP, its own cluster technology that was designed especially for virtualization. The array coordinator and hub witness services remove the need to have a quorum disk and allows GEO clustering. VM6 VMex can self recover from any type out outage.  The edge services that act as a cash proxy on our communication layer is built in the product and allows our customers to centrally manage a highly distributed IT infrastructure from anywhere.  Our virtual SAN solution consolidates and automates all the complex operations of setting up a clustered shared storage in a single and easy operation that takes only 10 seconds.  Our central monitoring and alerting is also built into the product and uses an easy to configure wizard that is based on subscription. Our customers also have access to a centralized event log within the VM6 VMex console. Our VDI solution is quite simple; it complements the rest of the functions that are built into the solution and it is compatible with any type of terminal using RDP protocol. One of the very important features of VM6 VMex is that it has full integration with active directory without creating any dependency on the DC or DNS service. Other virtualization solutions would automatically initiate a total failure if DNS or DC is not accessible. VM6 VMex can operate in both domain and workgroup infrastructures and will never initiate a failure if it lost DC or DNS connectivity. 

Where can our readers go to learn more? 

Readers can visit http://www.vm6software.com/ for more information. 

So where does VM6 Software go from here? 

This is just the beginning for us. In the upcoming months, you will hear more about who we are as a company and how we are penetrating the SMB space in virtualization. We will continue to listen to the needs of our customers and partners in the development of our product. Our short term roadmap includes new additions to the features set: 

• Application virtualization
• Provisioning services
• Real-time operational dashboard
• Microsoft System Center integration
• Microsoft Azure Integration