iomart Hosting, one of the UK’s leading providers of cloud computing and managed hosting, today announced that its iomart public cloud service has achieved  VMware vCloud Powered status, illustrating to customers that the company’s cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualization and cloud computing technology, namely VMware vSphere® and VMware vCloud® Director™.  A member of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), iomart Hosting provides its VMware vCloud Powered service as a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering distinctive application mobility uniquely available from VMware.

Sarah Haran, managing director of iomart Hosting, said: “iomart Hosting specialises in high availability, fully managed cloud solutions and we quickly realised that to provide market leading solutions we needed industry-leading leading hypervisor and management technology.”

Gavin Jackson, Director, vCloud & Service Providers, EMEA, VMware, said: “The VMware vCloud Powered program was developed to enable our service provider partners to differentiate themselves and help them bring their enterprise-class cloud services to market in this competitive landscape. We look forward to supporting iomart Hosting further as it delivers on the agility and performance customers are looking for in the cloud computing landscape.”

Customers of iomart Hosting have the ability to move workloads from their VMware vSphere-based virtualized or private cloud environment to the VMware vCloud Powered service and back again. This application portability is a key differentiator allowing customers to achieve the flexibility and security they need while enabling increased IT agility.

iomart Hosting sought VMware vCloud Powered validation in order to further expand its VMware-based cloud services and solutions. iomart’s public cloud service has been designed with public cloud and resellers in mind, offering convenient and scalable access to the VMware platform. Customers will be able to use it as their sole source of VMware provisioning or to extend the capacity of their private cloud deployments. As a validated provider, iomart Hosting can now provide users with enhanced responsiveness and agility, and reduced IT costs through increased consolidation, task automation and simplified management.

Sarah Haran of iomart Hosting, added: “Our move into the vCloud Powered program allows us to further expand our range of industry leadings solutions for our customers.”

iomart Hosting is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc which is ranked as one of the top 25 cloud services providers in the world by Talkin’ Cloud 50 and is Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year 2011.