Seattle startup Skytap rents out virtual lab space to software developers

One of Seattle’s hottest new startups may be a Pioneer Square company founded by a group of UW professors and a graduate student with an especially promising thesis project.

The project was the basis of a secretive company called Illumita they started in mid-2006.

Today the company’s revealing its core product, a new name and a chief executive recruited by investors who funded the company in August.

Now called Skytap http://www.skytap.com/ , the 20-person company is offering an online service called Virtual Lab.

It basically rents out virtual test labs in all sorts of configurations, so that software developers won’t have to set up labs themselves. Skytap hosts the labs at its data center, and users access them via browsers.

Brier Dudley

Seattle Times staff columnist

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