Flexiant named key partner for Parallels Automation suite

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1 Flexiant named key partner for Parallels Automation suite Analyst: Carl Brooks William Fellows 4 Mar, 2014 EMEA-based cloud platform software maker Flexiant is turning to a tried and true method to grow the customer base entering a channel arrangement with a much larger vendor as an object of resale. Virtualization and automation giant Parallels has productized Flexiant, and will be offering it as a deployment option to its customer base on a global basis. As with all things cloud, this requires feats of technological automation under the hood and finding ways to serve mundane, reality-based user needs. On the face of it, Flexiant and Parallels are competitors both have IaaS orchestration software that runs on a variety of hardware platforms and enables the service-provider business. Parallels has a large portfolio of related software; its two main businesses are desktop virtualization and automation, and Web hosting platform software. It has branched out into IaaS and other cloud-enabling technologies over the last few years, and boasts thousands of provider customers. Funded by venture capital, Flexiant is a much smaller organization that focuses only on IaaS software and has more than 100 deployments. The 451 Take This is a good deal for Flexiant. It gives it the potential to reach a far wider audience than it could have on its own, and it will be interesting to watch what this arrangement means in material terms. It's a nice tuck-in partnership for Parallels, which now can forgo cooking up all of the features around service-provider business use that Flexiant brings. It already counts some 10,000 service providers using Parallels to deliver cloud services, and will be targeting vcloud swap-outs with its Flexiant capability. It's another proof point for Parallels' Application Package Standard (APS), as well if Flexiant can profit by putting in the work to stick with the APS requirements, then others can, too, and the effect will be ongoing. Most importantly, it means that the cloud market is showing signs of maturity, with a developing ecosystem of Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 partners and channels that enable further growth. Deal rationale Flexiant has business features, and is hypervisor-agnostic; Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure doesn't, and isn't. The reasoning goes that Parallels' customers will want to buy Flexiant over the top of Parallels Automation instead of building their own IP and features. Parallels' Automation suite is designed for Parallels Cloud Servers and its Virtuozzo hypervisor, and it sells its Plesk suite of business software separately. Parallels Automation users can use Flexiant as a 'top layer' for Parallels Automation and, according to the company, crank out differentiated IaaS lines in a relatively painless way. Flexiant's orchestration, ability to craft templates quickly, and integrated user management and billing are the upsell; the Flexiant portal can easily be white-labeled and customized to a high degree, since, according to the APS standard and Flexiant's own development history, the software is API-accessible on almost every front. In theory, all the other APS-compatible software products and appliances, which include a swath of Microsoft's productivity and communication SKUs, can also be quickly attached and managed within the framework, like stacking blocks. In practice, combining even highly compatible applications is always real work, but it is usually easier to work within a standard than out of it. Colt is the key validation point for the integration of Flexiant and Parallels in its ThinkGrid-based Ceano cloud services offering for the channel. Parallels provides the customer management, metering and billing, storefront, and its APS packaging via a portal on top of the Flexiant provisioning and automation platform (customers see the Flexiant brand). APS 2 Parallels' Application Package Standard is in revision 2. There are more than 450 applications currently in the APS catalogue, ranging from major service initiatives like Office 365 and McAfee security software to obscure streaming music plug-ins for your website. Parallels introduced the standard more than five years ago. APS is essentially two parts one is the standard for developers that says they must present a certain type of ReST API to the system via an application endpoint; the other is an APS controller on the hoster's resources that handles application requests and allocations, working on the standard model-view-controller format. It allows for the host to treat resources for a large number of applications with consistency, and easily attach or detach compliant applications. Generally, if a developer has been following good practice, conforming to APS is a matter of shaping up existing APIs to expose relevant functionality. It's worth noting that Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 Flexiant says it spent nearly eight months doing so, in order to expose as wide a set of feature capabilities as possible to APS, and it expects that work will make it an attractive add-on for Parallels Automation customers. Business model Flexiant started its life as a hosting company, XCalibre Communications, in As it grew, XCalibre was in need of a cloud-like platform for managing its datacenters and started development of an orchestration platform dubbed Extility in The company used Extility to launch Europe's first public cloud service in Wanting to shift to just a product company, XCalibre's hosting business was sold in 2009, and the company was renamed Flexiant. The product itself was renamed Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator with the second release in The company has raised 9.8m ($16.3m) over its lifetime, primarily from Leopard Rock Capital Partners, a network of more than 100 high-net-worth individuals. The latest round was delivered in tranches over the last 12 months, totaling 6.5m. It's also landed a further 1m ($1.4m) funding for its participation in European Commission FP7 research projects. We estimate Flexiant's revenue to be less than $10m. The company has 50 employees, and has doubled engineering staff over the past year. It says it's signing four or more new customers per month, with the average sale price steadily rising. Currently, the median deal is six figures in US dollars. Competition Flexiant competes with the small IaaS platform vendors: OnApp, Egenera, Abiquo, Piston Cloud Computing and Mirantis, as well as VMware. More generally, there is a larger trend of systems vendors bundling IaaS capabilities with hardware and partnering with ISVs for the same. Dell has several options for IaaS off the shelf, HP has CloudSystem, and Microsoft should be competitive with Hyper-V and SCOM. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Flexiant has been talking to Parallels for a couple of years now as it seeks to become a go-to platform for service providers seeking an entry into cloud services. Opportunities Threats Customer acquisition will be the key barometer of success for this relationship. Flexiant hopes it will accelerate its momentum in the channel, from where it does 20% of its business today, to a position where it is doing 80% of its business in the channel in three years. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Flexiant believes it has identified a gap in Parallels' portfolio a credible, feature-rich cloud services platform for service providers that is multi-hypervisor and supports multiple resale channels. This is the value of Parallels-plus-Flexiant versus Parallels on its own (or Flexiant on KVM or Xen). On paper, Flexiant's own application plug-in environment is encroaching on Parallels' APS territory. It will have added support for OpenStack by year-end (although which version is not yet known), and we suspect Docker will also feature in the future. The key threat, however, will be from the vendors it is seeking to swap out at service providers. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Daily T1R. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5