UForge Appliance Factory is a flexible automated factory for virtualization and cloud environments that allows users to: 1) Visually design software appliances in minutes and generate them in any format, such as for IBM, Amazon, VMware, and Eucalyptus clouds. 2) Create scalable, elastic appliances using unique vApp technology. 3) Avoid vendor lock-in and reduce software integration costs by up to 60% while decreasing configuration times by 10x.