Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: FastScale Composer Suite Enterprise Edition

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 10 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: The FastScale Composer Suite Enterprise Edition builds and manages servers for customers while allowing solution providers to make margin and expand sales opportunities without increase staff.

The Lowdown: Solution providers realize that there is opportunity in the data center. Customers are looking to reduce power and cooling, save space and decrease the number of man-hours required setting up and tweaking data center design. The FastScale Composer Suite Enterprise Edition lets solution providers earn margins while saving time with "logical servers."

"A logical server is a way to build up a server stack, like a recipe," said Jerry McLeod, vice president of marketing and business development for FastScale. "The server is like a refrigerator, and a logical server is the recipe. The fridge holds the eggs, cheese and milk, but you can bake a cake or make an omelet with those ingredients."

FastScale Composer Suite

The Composer Suite takes the components a customer specifies -- in the data center those ingredients are Apache, an operating system and specific IP addresses, for example -- and creates the architecture that will comprise the applications on any given server. Once that recipe is in place, solution providers can take that recipe and put images on servers in the time it takes for the machine to boot.

"The logical server is designed once, and then it can be deployed as many times as a customer requires," said McLeod. "If a customer needs to bring up five new servers -- virtual, physical, it doesn't matter -- the database containing the logical server and its components can be clicked on and deployed from anywhere."

That lessens the load on solution providers and customers alike. Rather than having to maintain and fix existing servers, FastScale's Composer Suite Enterprise Edition allows IT employees to focus on trying new things and innovating in the data center rather than being a slave to existing machines.

"[Composer Suite] is great for the channel," said McLeod. "Channel pros know their customers. Using the product lets solution providers spend less time worrying about server maintenance and more time expanding on existing deals."