Virtual Iron Launches Channel One Global Partner Program; Program Expands Market Opportunity for Value-Added Channel Partners with Enterprise-Class Alternative for Virtualization and Infrastructure Management

Business Wire, Sept 18, 2006

LOWELL, Mass. -- Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure in the data center, today announced the launch of its Channel One program for value-added resellers, systems integrators and consulting firms. The program enables channel partners to significantly broaden their solution portfolio and grow revenue opportunities with the first true enterprise-class virtualization alternative.

Virtual Iron delivers its software exclusively through a core group of channel partners in each region and the product's advanced capabilities create a number of consulting and professional services opportunities for channel partners. These include data center assessments, physical to virtual migration, business continuity planning, capacity planning and utilization, implementation and deployment, policy-based automation development and various managed services.

"Virtual Iron offers a comprehensive virtualization and management solution that enables users to take full advantage of new technologies like the open source hypervisor and new hardware-assist capabilities from Intel and AMD," said Ken Simon, Vice President of Sales for Enterico, a division of Continental Resources. "This complements our expertise in streamlining data center infrastructure and management and delivering the latest technology solutions to our customers."

"Virtual Iron provides state-of-the-art virtualization and management solutions and offers a distinct price advantage compared to alternative solutions," said Norio Nakai, Managing Executive Officer, Enterprise Business Unit, Nissho Electronics Japan. "We are already seeing strong demand for the Virtual Iron solution in the Japanese market and have incorporated it into a Virtualization Starter package with offerings from IBM-Japan and Nissho Electronics."

The Virtual Iron platform combines advanced virtualization and policy-based management capabilities with an open source hypervisor derived from the Xen community open source project. It takes full advantage of new hardware-assisted virtualization from Intel and AMD and provides support for unmodified 32- and 64-bit Linux and Windows operating systems, as well as for SMP and very large memory (96GB). Virtual Iron is purpose-built for production-class workloads and supports hundreds of physical servers and thousands of virtual servers. It automates many time-intensive manual tasks such as provisioning new servers and moving capacity to handle dynamic workloads. The software also monitors physical systems and automatically responds to availability issues. These capabilities enable users to streamline data center management while dramatically reducing capital and operating expenses.

"Virtual Iron's business model is entirely channel-driven so we're very focused on our partners' success," said John C. Thibault, President and CEO of Virtual Iron. "Our product is the first virtualization and management solution that is truly enterprise-ready. With our superior performance and economic price point, we will help our value-added resellers expand their market opportunity with existing customers while attracting new users of virtualization technologies at the same time."

The Virtual Iron Channel One Program provides a number of partner support resources including:

--Comprehensive sales and marketing support

--On-site sales and technical training

--Joint marketing, press and lead generation programs

--Lead registration and qualified lead distribution

--Pre/post-sales and technical support

--Partner knowledgebase

--Demo and evaluation software

--Dedicated account support

Broad Channel Support

"Virtual Iron helps differentiate our offerings with an excellent virtualization solution that is priced at approximately 50% of the cost of VMware," said Zoran Jovanovic, Founder of Austrian-based Prosper Intelligence GmbH. "In addition, Virtual Iron will offer a growing marketing opportunity for all channel partners with no channel conflict."

"Our customers rely on Akibia, as an independent, trusted advisor, to help them identify the best technologies and solutions to reduce costs and maximize ROI," said Ken McLaurin, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Virtualization, of Akibia. "Akibia's professional services team helps our customers assess, architect and deploy the best virtualization solutions to achieve their individual business goals. With Virtual Iron, Akibia now provides an enterprise-class virtualization solution that is uniquely suited to help our customers reduce the number of servers in their data center, improve disaster recovery and enable rapid provisioning."

"Virtual Iron offers an excellent solution for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management," said Douglas Vercellotti, vice president of business development at LogicsOne. "We believe the open-source hypervisor will quickly become an industry-standard and we expect there to be strong demand in the market for an enterprise-class solution built on top of it, such as Virtual Iron's.