Flexiant updates its service-provider cloud platform, adding service customization hooks

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1 Flexiant updates its service-provider cloud platform, adding service customization hooks Analyst: Michael Coté William Fellows 4 Nov, 2013 Having received 6.5m in funding over the last 12 months, Flexiant has been signing four to six service-provider customers a month for its turnkey public cloud platform. The company's 4.0 release of Cloud Orchestrator aims to give service providers all the software needed to run a public cloud, treating management of the computational aspects as just table stakes; the customer and business management services are the real difficulty, Flexiant argues, and thus value in the product. The 451 Take This release from Flexiant shows its strategic focus on service providers instead of the enterprise market. Service providers are hungry to stand up clouds quickly to meet expectations around rising demand, but the providers also need ways to differentiate their service offerings. Flexiant is directly addressing this strategic need by opening its platform, allowing service providers to customize how cloud services are delivered beyond a simple cookie-cutter approach. On paper, this portfolio makes Flexiant look attractive to service providers that would like that magic unicorn of cloud: quickly standing up a differentiated portfolio of cloud offerings for as little money as possible... that actually works. Flexiant is reporting a steady rate of new customers, which casts a positive light on their attempts in this tough space. Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 Context 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 over its lifetime, primarily from Leopard Rock Capital Partners, a network of over 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 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 prices steadily rising. Currently the median deal is six figures in US dollars. Customers Flexiant claims 120 production deployments up from 40 and 100 at the beginning of this year. Colt continues to be a channel partner, using Flexiant to drive its Ceano on-demand IT services for SMEs, which is available only through Colt's own channel partners. Flexiant has already done 17 Ceano customer installs and has a multi-year deal with Colt in hand. Flexiant claims it will land another major telco shortly. Products When it comes to arming service providers, Flexiant does the whole enchilada, with hefty sides and plenty of chips and queso. Running a commercial cloud requires more than just spinning up nodes and allocating storage and networking assets. The back-office business management needed by service providers to collect cash for cloud services can be as complicated as the computational management that's the mainstay of cloud discussions. To continue the Tex-Mex metaphor, the Flexiant combo plate includes items from physical device and virtualization management to provisioning and automation, product catalog, self-service portal, metering, billing and chargeback plus end-user APIs. Again, all of this is targeted at giving service providers the platform and services they need to deliver and sell public cloud services. Version 4.5, due in spring, will increase the focus on speeding up service providers' ability to sell Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 more cloud: faster to market, quicker time to value, to paying customers. Importantly, this will see the Xen-based Flexiant extend support to OpenStack components; for example, the ability to use OpenStack object storage in all hypervisors. Its game plan is ambitious to create what the market is hungry for a credible OpenStack (compatible, at least) service-provider edition 'in a box.' This isn't a fundamental swap-out of technologies: OpenStack support is not replacing the core of the Flexiant platform. Instead, OpenStack is more akin to an available 'flavor,' much the same way as VMware or Hyper-V are supported as the virtualization technology. Service providers will, of course, be interested in differentiating their offerings. The alternative to having unique features for which you can charge a premium over commodity-priced IT is competing on price, a game that few companies want to enter because the main combatant, Amazon, consistently lowers prices each year. To help service providers pursue the higher-margin ground, Flexiant is introducing a plug-in framework that allows service providers to customize the cloud platform. The plug-in framework uses the Flexiant Development Language (FDL), which is based on Lau, scripting language targeted at scale use, most notably being used in World of Warcraft. The plug-in framework also includes triggers to fire off CRUD-like (Create, Read, Update, Delete) events before and after they occur in the cloud. This allows service providers to customize how services are deployed, perform integration with third parties, and otherwise add their 'special sauce' to Flexiant's stock cloud services. For example, an FDL plug-in could help a service provider integrate with its own back-end billing system or various payment providers. You could image a service provider writing a plug-in to automatically add a firewall to new nodes in a cloud, or otherwise customizing how 'bare nodes' are configured, allowing the service provider to create unique cloud servers. At release, notable plug-ins are available for MailChimp, Zapier, XMP, RabbitMQ, Zendesk and Twilio. There are several other additions to the platform as well. Flexiant has added support for using Chef to maintain server configuration, tying Chef into Flexiant's Bento templating system. There's also a billing metering service bundled in the platform, and attention to improving ease of use with context-sensitive help added throughout the UI. To help expand geographically, Flexiant has also added language support for Spanish, Russian, French and German and support for non-latin languages, which the company hopes third parties will add. Going forward, the company is looking at additional types of OpenStack support to its platform. In the same way it supports VMware as a component in its platform, Flexiant is looking to add in OpenStack as a type of cloud service framework. Very intentionally, and in the spirit of the open community around OpenStack, Flexiant is pre-announcing these intentions to get maximum Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 involvement in this road map. Contributing code to the community is also a high possibility. The company said it was, for example, looking at how to support OpenStack storage support for all hypervisors in a Flexiant-based cloud. Competition Each week seems to bring a new entrant to the cloud platform and management space. However, few are squarely focused on just service providers: software vendors here, like VMware, typically start by pursuing both enterprises and service providers and winnowing down as they find traction with one group. OnApp, OEM deals with Joyent, and VMware's service-provider-enablement programs are the most direct competitors. Flexiant says Abiquo is a partial competitor as well. In-house efforts around OpenStack and CloudStack compete for service providers' attention as well, often relying on OpenStack servicing companies like Mirantis. Companies like Dell Enstratius, VMware's vcac portfolio and ServiceMesh are targeting cloud orchestration functionality, but for enterprises. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Flexiant's platform should be mature and its customer base, such as Colt, is strong evidence that it works. The attention to service providers' back-office needs is rare among cloud platform builders, which tend to focus on just core infrastructure components, often targeted at enterprises. By virtue of depending on its own platform, Flexiant can seem 'non-standard' and will need to rely on building its own ecosystem of third-party support and partners to get the leverage that a broad, de facto standard-based platform brings. Opportunities Threats Market demand for cloud platforms is clearly high and there are few credible options that aren't distracted by enterprise requirements. Flexiant has credibility in this space and several years behind it already. As the OpenStack and other cloud platform communities mature their core they'll quickly go after arming service providers, bringing a broad mix of competitors to the market. Copyright The 451 Group 4

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