Vendor lineage
Kyndryl Cloud Uplift (formerly Skytap) - the laboratory is the hard part
Cloud environment platform founded 2006 as Skytap by university researchers, widely used for virtual training labs; now Kyndryl Cloud Uplift.
Skytap was founded in Seattle in 2006 as Illumita, by three University of Washington professors who had researched virtualisation and a graduate student. It provides self-service cloud environments used for development, testing and virtual training laboratories. Kyndryl acquired it in 2024 and now offers it as Kyndryl Cloud Uplift.
Its own documentation shows what a training laboratory needs. Each environment has a separate, private network, fenced from every other, so environments can use identical or overlapping addresses and identical copies can run side by side: one per student. A course on virtual machines needs machines; a course on networking needs a topology, with its broadcast domains, tagged links, routing adjacencies and deliberate failures, and a copy of it for everyone in the room.
The laboratory is the expensive half of technical training and the half nobody sees in a course description. Equipment that reproduces a production environment, per student, available at the hour a class begins and destroyed afterwards, is a harder problem than the teaching, and it decides what can honestly be taught at all.
It is also unusual in what it runs. Alongside ordinary servers it supports AIX and IBM i on Power hardware - the systems that keep operating in banks and insurers long after the industry has stopped writing about them. Those environments still need people who can work them, and people are trained where the systems are. Under Kyndryl that has become the headline: the Kyndryl Cloud Uplift page leads with moving IBM Power workloads to Azure without rewriting them.
- Skytap (Wikipedia): founded as Illumita in 2006 in Seattle by Brian Bershad, Hank Levy and Steve Gribble, University of Washington professors who had researched virtualisation and cloud computing, with graduate student David Richardson; renamed Skytap in 2008, launching Skytap Virtual Lab in April of that year; early funding from the Washington Research Foundation, later Insight, Madrona, Ignition, Bezos Expeditions and OpenView; acquired by Kyndryl in 2024
- Kyndryl - Kyndryl Cloud Uplift (formerly Skytap), the address skytap.com now leads to: "Kyndryl Cloud Uplift, formerly Skytap, allows you to run IBM Power workloads such as AIX, IBM i, and x86 in Azure without rewriting or refactoring" (read 2026-10-07)
- Kyndryl Cloud Uplift Help and Documentation - overview: "a cloud platform for creating, managing, and sharing virtual machine environments", each of one or more virtual machines and one or more networks, from a single VM to an entire virtual data center (read 2026-10-07)
- Kyndryl Cloud Uplift Help and Documentation - networking overview: each environment has a separate, private network fenced from the others, so environments can use identical or overlapping IP addresses and identical copies can run at the same time (read 2026-10-07)
- Kyndryl Cloud Uplift Help and Documentation - Course Manager, instructor-led training: a lab environment for each participant, provisioned, started, stopped and cleaned up according to the event schedule (read 2026-10-07)