By sharing resources, IT shops can drive up utilization of existing hardware, while making it easier to manage new systems when the need to scale up arises. Physical and virtual resources are all managed and monitored from the same interface.

Most applications can run on Platform ISF, according to Staten, but enterprises may be hesitant to move workloads that typically run on isolated, high-performance resources. For example, an or ERP system might not be the first application an IT shop would move to Platform ISF, he says.

While internal clouds can accommodate developer workloads, Staten advocates a mixture of private and public clouds. Once a developer workload needs to be performance-tested, it is likely an internal cloud will be too small, he says. Cloud vendors still need to address so-called “cloud-bursting,” the ability to dynamically access additional resources from Web-based services like Amazon EC2, he says.

Security shouldn’t be a major concern with Platform Computing, which was founded in 1992 and is a well-known vendor in the enterprise, Staten says. “Most of the security concerns have been addressed by previous [Platform Computing] products,” he says. “They’re a well-established enterprise solution.”