Seattle, Wash. – December 12, 2011 – Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced that Cushman & Wakefield, the world’s largest privately held real estate services firm operating in 230 global locations across 60 countries, has chosen to move its application development and test environments to the Skytap Cloud. Cushman & Wakefield selected Skytap to leverage its unique ability to simply and securely provision new complex computing environments and collaborate across global development and test teams. As a result, Cushman & Wakefield has accelerated software release cycles, decreased environment build times from days to minutes, and reduced costs.
“Creating an agile IT environment is a core competitive advantage that has allowed us to adapt to changing business conditions in the real estate software and services industry,” said Leif Maiorini, senior managing director at Cushman & Wakefield. “By using the Skytap Cloud for our development and test environments, our software release cycles are faster and more efficient, which allows our professionals to service their clients’ needs even better. The cloud model has proven to be transformative to our business in just a short period of time.”
Before the cloud, provisioning IT environments for Cushman & Wakefield’s development and test teams took anywhere from days to weeks depending on workload and availability of IT resources. Widely dispersed development, test and quality assurance teams also struggled with frequent “back and forth” delays during release cycles due to difficulty collaborating on new application features.
With Skytap, Cushman & Wakefield gained access to on-demand, self-service and scalable infrastructure with pay-as-you go flexibility. The company’s development and test, quality assurance and support teams can leverage existing tools and development practices without complex coding or architectural changes. To support collaboration, Skytap provides the ability to create identical copies of development and test stacks, and share customer-specific issues and environments using a simple Skytap URL. As a result, Cushman & Wakefield can now create development and test environments in minutes rather than days, and accelerate software release cycles without additional IT support or cost.
“Cushman & Wakefield is an innovative company utilizing the cloud to support broader business goals,” said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap. “Cushman & Wakefield can now extend its market leadership by delivering high quality software at a faster pace.”
