One of the biggest issues enterprises face today is managing their server stacks and keeping up with new technology.  There’s established systems to upend, complex connections to consider, and compatibility issues to address.  No wonder there’s a flood of startups and services that offer enterprise-level products that minimize cloud management, extend APIs to centralized dashboards and connect the hyperv dots on your behalf.  But most of these companies are offering short-term fixes that offer little beyond a Band-aid solution to an underlying problem.

HotLink, a unifying transformation platform, takes a bottom-up approach so those underlying problems are addressed head on.  Emerging from stealth mode today, HotLink plants its flag in the virtualization landscape, offering the first virtual integration and transformation platform, starting with the HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware.  It enables VMware vCenter users to deploy cross-platform infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.  This is an enterprise-grade integration platform that fully decouples management consoles from the underlying virtual infrastructure, providing native interoperability for hypervisors.  Simply put, you can run automated systems across platforms from VMware’s hypervisor.

what HotLink has built is a generic platform that’s agnostic across servers, APIs and automated processes.  It was designed this way, from the bottom up, avoiding other issues competitors face when it’s time to truly scale in a compatible manner.  Taking the idea of vendor agnosticism to the next level, HotLink’s tranformation platform is a tool that allows these virtual environments to better communicate with each other.  A new standard for private cloud management, HotLink is a liberator of sorts, focusing on the lowest common denominator to harmonize hypervisors.

One reason it’s important to have an enterprise-grade infrastructure is that the HotLink platform isn’t vendor-specific.  The generic solution emulates other platforms inside different management environments, and HotLink is really going after an extensible approach.  Long term, we’re likely to see an open developer offering to further the evolution HotLink’s platform.

Today’s launch delivers a solution for VMware, but what about other server offerings from different vendors?  HotLink is working on it, and can readily do so, with $10 million in Series A funding.  Led by Foundation Capital, Leapfrog Ventures also participated in this round.  You can expect some development in the public cloud sector as well, as HotLink really strives towards a new standard with its transformation platform.

“We view our contribution to the industry in platform transformation,” says HotLink co-founder Lynn LeBlanc.  “Where we’re taking that is to systematically over time provide these same kinds of extensions to other management infrastructures.  And also considering all the public cloud platforms are built on various types of these existing hypervisors, you can expect the same functions to be offered to public cloud providers. We’ll do the same kind of abstraction layer to add portability to public cloud sectors.”

Establishing standards in the enterprise is an important goal for LeBlanc, who has a long history of serving the enterprise sector.  LeBlanc, along with HotLink VP of engineering Richard Offer, previously founded FastScale Technology, acquired by EMC in late 2009, and subsequently by VMware.  With a stellar executive team and an equally noteworthy board that includes Mark Tonnesen, CIO of McAfee, and Tony Young, CIO of Informatica, HotLink has spent the past year-and-a-half developing a tool that would adhere to certain cloud environments to ease management, cloning, hosting and migration in the cloud.  The previous experience of HotLink’s team is pivotal in this new company’s success, which goes straight for the jugular with a comprehensive enterprise-level solution, starting at $25k for up to five hosts of any size.  HotLink SuperVISOR will be available beginning Aug. 31, in conjunction with VMworld.

“Having been in computing for a long time now, I tend to always come at it from an enterprise perspective in the cloud,” LeBlanc continues.  “The enterprise has different challenges than others–they have a massive scale and business that already exists across a wide range.  You have to have a certain customer in mind, and ours is the enterprise clients looking to build out.”