DynamicOps recently announced a key intelligent resource management expansion to its DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, which is currently the industry's only user-aware self-service VM reconfiguration capability. With this new enhancement, customers will now be able to automate and streamline ongoing VM management, which in turn will help them reduce their ongoing management service delivery from days to just minutes.

"To get the best ROI from cloud computing, enterprises need to tightly control resources while also providing more flexibility and autonomy for users,” Chad Jones (News - Alert), vice president of strategy and product management, DynamicOps said. “Our new capability gives IT the ability to drive much more efficient resource utilization while providing users with the choice they need to do their jobs. We're enabling enterprises to move far beyond the partial automation that other cloud vendors offer by enforcing granular governance with policies instead of people."

Unlike other cloud solutions, DynamicOps' latest VM reconfiguration feature helps increase resource efficiencies during the entire lifecycle by bringing together both broad self-service and automation capabilities with granular governance.

According to Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner (News - Alert), cloud automation should address more than initial provisioning.

“Enabling delegation of ongoing management functions such as resource reconfiguration is an essential component of any private, hybrid or public cloud service,” she said. “This improves customer satisfaction as well as overall service delivery efficiencies, while assuring enterprise policies are enforced based on governance set by cloud administrators."

IT departments will now be able to take full advantage of user-aware governance and create policies upfront that include stipulations such as who is permitted to reconfigure VMs, which machine types they can reconfigure, how many resources they can consume per machine type, which pool of resources will be tapped and whether approvals are required. This will give companies the ability to manage both resources and costs, while at the same time meeting the demands for self-service management and personalization of resources.

In other industry news, cloud communications provider GFI Software is starting 2012 off with a bang as the company recently announced that currently more than 5,000 managed service providers (MSPs) are relying on the GFI MAX RemoteManagement to support more than 65,000 networks worldwide.

This number is double that of the GFI MAX customer base over the last two years and is in large part due to GFI’s strong growth in the U.S. and international markets.

“We’ve successfully grown our partner base by focusing on what MSPs need to profitably grow their businesses,” said Dr. Alistair Forbes, general manager of the GFI MAX Business Unit. “That starts with an easily deployed RMM platform, competitive pricing and simple billing, and a commitment to enhancing the solution through the integration of new services to create incremental revenue opportunities for our partners.”