Embotics is releasing a new version of its V-Commander virtualization and cloud management software Aug. 22, 2012, with a new focus on delivering IT-as-a-service (ITaaS).

Embotics CEO Jay Litkey (pictured) told Talkin’ Cloud that this latest version of V-Commander transitions the product from VM-centric to service-centric — a shift that came about as a result of customer feedback and requirements. In prior releases, customers would publish the V-Commander service catalog for its end users, deploy private clouds to internal clients and then the IT staff would request and provision virtual machines through Embotics’ products.

As cloud provisioning moves strictly out of the hands of IT and into self-service end user provisioning, the ability to request and provision VMs in a simple manner will become of much greater importance, and that’s the point of the new V-Commander.

Up until now, Embotics has positioned V-Commander as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), but now the focus is on ITaaS.

What would a new version of a product be without new features and functionality, though? Besides self-service provisioning, Embotics also has added the ability to publish non-virtual service provisioning to its storefront, including the provisioning of smartphones, laptops and other mobile devices. Embotics’ role is to manage the entire request process and take some of the load off of IT staff.

Litkey said channel partners will find opportunities in taking V-Commander and wrapping consultative services around it. If they can provide differentiated services around V-Commander, then they can provide something new and of value to customers, he said.

Embotics will be showing off all of V-Commander’s new features in a multi-hypervisor environment next week at VMworld 2012.

Self-service provisioning is one of those things that seems a bit overdue in the IT world. Although there are many tools that make it takes some of the pressure off of IT for provisioning of services and devices, anything that can further alleviate those pressures will go a long way to simplifying things in the enterprise — as long as security is taken into consideration and limits are set on what end users can and cannot do.