By Tony Lucas, Founder, Flexiant
The cloud services market is in a transitory phase. We are witnessing the weakening of the argument that states that individuals or companies need to own and manage their own computing resources.
Increasingly, these individuals and companies will turn to cloud based utility services to get the job done. Gartner and IDC both predict significant public cloud growth. Gartner predicts that public cloud services will grow from £109bn in 2012 to £206bn by 2016. IDC’s prediction is that spend on public cloud services will grow at a rate five times greater than the average increase in IT spend.
The opportunity for cloud service providers is significant, but these organisations need a way to promote margin and revenue growth opportunities by being able to offer a differentiated end-user experience which helps to increase the cloud platform consumption. Organizations can then focus on growing their business, instead of wasting time on repetitive and reproducible activities enabling the focus for more complex, value added services to be developed.
The clock is ticking for cloud service providers; the time is now for these cloud service providers to stop hemming and hawing over what new cloud technology to deploy and instead act now to stay ahead of the competition. This is the decade of the service provider and if new technology is not adopted, revenue opportunities will be lost.
In reading David Terrar’s post on some of the challenges for cloud ISV CTOs to overcome, one of the challenges I particularly agreed with was the advice on not developing it all yourself. David writes:
[quote_box_centre]”Don’t develop it all yourself. In the past the typical software company would have developers who thought they could do it all. The perception was always that it would be cheaper to build the support system or billing system or customer forum exactly the way we want it to work rather than buy. The end result was a whole load of bespoke software to support to run the business with limited functionality and no best practice. The smart development teams know what they are good at and stick to it.”[/quote_box_centre]
Corporations are looking to concentrate on what they do best. The stars are aligned for service providers to capitalise on this opportunity, but having the capabilities to offer the orchestration businesses require presents a challenge. This is where cloud services providers need to stop looking to develop bespoke solutions and instead harness the benefits of proven, mature and reliable cloud orchestration solutions.
Cloud orchestration software can help by managing all elements of a cloud platform; physical and virtual resources. It allows organisations to turn traditional hardware into a cloud platform by automating and streamlining the deployment while managing and provisioning those resources appropriately. This way, service providers get the most from their investments and exploit the growth opportunities of cloud services.
With that in mind, Flexiant has today announced its latest version of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3. With V3.0, the entire range of cloud service providers including traditional hosting companies, managed service providers, telecommunication companies and new entrants to the cloud services market can create a cloud services business that customers love.
What Info-Tech Research Group Thinks
Named by Info-Tech Research Group as a Cloud Management Trendsetter in its “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management Solutions” report, Flexiant was evaluated against nine other competitors including Abiquo, CA Technologies, Citrix, Eucalyptus, Nimbula, OpenStack, Virtustream and VMware. Flexiant was rated the leading innovator and as a solution of choice for service providers or indeed anyone, such as hosting companies or telco, which wants to build a cloud services business quickly rather than build an internally focused enterprise cloud.
The “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management Solutions” highlighted Flexiant’s strengths including standout dashboard customisability, flexible and integrated billing capabilities, quota and permission management, and alerts tied to resource utilisation and flexible deployment options with multi-hypervisor support.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3 offers a cloud orchestration solution for on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services. The latest version combines Flexiant Cloud Orchestrators previous capabilities – multi cluster support, across multiple locations and geographies, all managed from a single pane of glass portal, multi hypervisor support, granular metering and billing, highly configurable user interface, roll based access control, an extensive API and reseller capabilities – with new features to extend the provisioning of resources to the application.
New features include:
- Bento Boxes, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s functionality for delivering pre-configured application provisioning, allows service providers to offer pre-packaged, pre-configured and sophisticated application stacks that are ready to use.
- SmartFilters gives users the ability to track both virtual and physical resources according to business needs and requirements in a way that makes sense to them.
- V3 offers scalability assurance.
- Flexiant is also announcing its Universal Storage Solution (USS) which removes the storage compatibility headache.
- Support for the Hyper-V (2012) hypervisor.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3 further supports service providers, traditional hosting organisations and telecommunication companies with a cloud orchestration solution that is reliable and mature at a compelling price point. Flexiant now offers four new cloud management software editions to give companies of all sizes access to Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3. It offers traditional hosting companies an alternative orchestration solution that works while providing an upgrade path to advanced functionality currently experienced in the service provider market.
What Our Customers Say
Selected by Cartika, a leader in application hosting and advanced clustering technologies, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3 will provide the cloud orchestration solution it requires internally and to meet its customers’ expectations of a more automated and flexible solution.
[quote_center]Andrew Rouchotas, CEO, Cartika, explained, “We knew we needed a cloud provisioning platform that would enable us to provide enterprise grade solutions, help us differentiate against other service providers and that would also support both our current and future business strategies. We discussed internal development, but the time to market was prohibitive. After looking at several vendors, it became obvious that Flexiant was clearly a more mature and stable software solution than anything else available. Flexiant’s product is head and shoulders above the alternatives. We were impressed with its robustness and ease of deployment and also the service delivery team’s ability to meet our bespoke needs.”[/quote_center]
[quote_box_center]Richard Parker, Market Development Director at ITEX explains, “ITEX originally embarked on a do it yourself type project using existing technologies and found after a number of months that the amount of effort required to build a robust cloud platform that could stand the scrutiny of very well informed clients was quite an undertaking.
It soon became evident that the work and resource involved was impractical. ITEX went out to the market to re-evaluate the commercial platforms available and selected Flexiant for its flexibility, simplicity, scalability and affordability. The ability to monitor and bill on a very granular level to its client base was of paramount importance to ITEX, yet it wasn’t a feature it had seen in other systems.”[/quote_box_center]
Over the last year Flexiant has gained significant momentum in the marketplace. With two new versions of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, new licensing editions, named by Info-Tech Research Group as an innovator and trendsetter, customer endorsements, Flexiant is definitely a company on the move and one to watch.
For further information visit http://www.flexiant.com
