Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Gale Brings Automation in Cloud, Sees Opportunity in Call Center and UC Environments

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines

The popular children’s game telephone demonstrates one of the key tenets of humanity, which is that although we have much in common, different people tend to take away different things from the same instructions. That can be great in terms of creativity, but not so good if you’re seeking consistency in repeatable processes.

That’s why Gale Technologies (News - Alert) provides automation software for quality assurance, lab and production environments. The company’s software automates configuration of compute, network, storage and virtualization environments.

Bill Martinson, vice president of corporate strategy at Gale Technologies, which counts Cisco (News - Alert) Systems, Ericsson and NetApp among its customers, says organizations today are spending most of their IT budgets on virtualization, but they’ve already virtualized the low-hanging fruit and are now running into a wall. However, he says, they still want to automate heterogeneous environments. Gale can help with that, he says.

The company’s flagship software is GaleForce, which the company’s website says “builds cloud-like environments out of existing infrastructure within labs and enterprises via provisioning and orchestration of bare-metal, physical and virtual IT resources.” The solution is aimed at increasing time to market and lowering costs by enabling “thousands of users to reserve, schedule and execute workloads on a shared, heterogeneous environment with automated provisioning and decommissioning of workload environments.”

Just earlier this week the company announced new service tiering capabilities for its GaleForce Turnkey Cloud solutions. It lets organizations convert compute, network, and storage infrastructure into a private or hybrid cloud environment. Gale and NetApp jointly demonstrated the GaleForce Turnkey Cloud Solution for NetApp with service tiering, along with integration to the Cisco Unified Computing System and Cisco Nexus data center switches, at the recent Cisco Live 2011 event. 

“Providing service tiering capabilities expands yet simplifies the control users have when building, deploying, and managing real-world clouds. We are working to remove the complexities that have plagued cloud computing and strive to offer simple solutions to completely transform existing environments into real cloud deployments,” says Akhil Sahai, vice president of product management at Gale Technologies. “The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud has continued to gain tremendous acceptance from enterprise and service providers. With the help of our partners NetApp and Cisco, Gale is working to further provide users with integrated tools that accelerate cloud implementations.”

Gale also on July 19 announced three new resource adapters for the GaleForce automation software. That includes the NetApp OnCommand open management storage APIs, Cisco UCS servers, and Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches. 

Martinson also sees opportunities in doing infrastructure automation related to voice and unified communications. He says Gale already knows how to do that, and can help people on that front as they are rolling our new call centers or upgrading to UC.