Flexiant Ltd

Flexiant_Logo.jpeg

Flexiant is a UK-based Software company founded in 2009 that provides software to cloud services providers.

Flexiant has offices in London, Edinburgh, and New York City and software test labs in Amsterdam and London.

History

The Flexiant heritage in the service provider and cloud industry stretches back to 1997 when founder, Tony Lucas, formed a hosting company called XCalibre Communications. XCalibre saw a need amongst their service provider customers for cloud management tools, so they began to develop Extility, a cloud orchestration software. However, after distributing Extility to their customer base, it became clear that the need for this type of software existed in the overall market as well. This led to the public release of Extility and XCalibre officially became a software provider and hosting provider.

In 2007, XCalibre built and launched FlexiScale, using Extility. FlexiScale was Europe’s first public cloud platform, released a full nine month’s earlier than Amazon’s European cloud platform. This platform consisted of pay-as-you-go virtual dedicated servers that could be set up in less than a minute by customers themselves. This meant web hosting companies were no longer needed to set up and provision dedicated servers anymore.

XCalibre, the web hosting business was sold in 2009, and the remaining company was renamed Flexiant. Due to the success of FlexiScale, Flexiant dedicated their full focus to developing software solutions for other service providers in Europe.

In 2010, Flexiant launched the first version of Extility Cloud Orchestration, and by 2011, 95 customers were using the software.

2012 then saw significant changes in the business. In January of the year, Flexiant secured additional funding and expanded their management team. Early May brought a change of name to the Extility software to its present name, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Version 2.0. This launch improved significantly upon the previous Extility software.

Also with this launch, Flexiant began to expand their market reach further, picking up partners across Europe and the US, creating a test lab in Amsterdam and building their presence in North America with an office in New York.

The company’s most recent launch in November 2012 brought Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Version 3.0 to the market. This update has four editions: two targeting hosting providers and two targeting service providers and telecoms. This means that the Flexiant products are more tailored for those who use it.

Moreover, in November, 2012, Info-Tech Research Group awarded the Trendsetter Award to Flexiant for their Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 2.0 version of cloud management solutions.

In January 2013, Flexiant took on their largest sponsorship to date as the Premier Sponsor of Cloud Expo Europe.

In April 2013, Gartner recognised Flexiant as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Management.

In May 2013, Flexiant released Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3.1. This version extends functionality and integration for metering and billing cloud services, simplifies product catalog management across reseller environments, and offers extensive customization with upgraded Flexiant APIs, Flexiant Query Language and a new Flexiant Development Language.

In November 2013, Flexiant released Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V4.0. Flexiant has opened up version 4 of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator to deliver a new platform that supports easy integration with third party technologies, as well as future support for OpenStack. This gives service providers access to a wide range of third party plugins allowing them to tailor a vast arsenal of differentiated services with which to secure new customers and revenue stream.

Software overview

On 15th Oct 2014, Flexiant launched Flexiant Concerto- a simple solution to multi cloud workload management and portability. Flexiant Concerto is a hosted platform that enables application lifecycle management (ALM) ideal for service providers wanting to help developers build next generation applications across multiple clouds. With Flexiant Concerto you can enable your customers to:

  • Leverage multiple clouds for resilience, flexibility and choice
  • Take the complexity out of deploying cloud application stacks with our blueprints feature
  • Optimize the end user’s experience through application-aware auto scaling
  • Significantly reduce latency by routing global end users to the web server closest to them

Flexiant Concerto works with all of the major cloud management platforms including:

  • Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator
  • OpenStack (Diablo)
  • VMware vCloud Director
  • VMware vCloud Automation Center
  • Eucalyptus
  • Joyent SmartDataCenter
  • OpenNebula

From May 2012, Flexiant has offered Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator version 2.0 which was a fully automated software suite that enabled managed service providers, hosting providers, data centre operators and enterprises to offer cloud-computing services to their customers.

On 28 November 2012, Flexiant released the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator version 3.0, which marked a significant leap forward in technological capabilities and features. In addition, with this launch, Flexiant has changed their target market to include not only Managed Service Providers but also hosting providers and telecoms globally. In November 2013, Flexiant released Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V4.0. Flexiant has opened up version 4 of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator to deliver a new platform that supports easy integration with third party technologies, as well as future support for OpenStack.

Capabilities of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Version 4.0 include:

  • Universal Storage support (including local storage)
  • Universal Node support
  • Multiple Cluster support
  • Multi-currency, multi-language support
  • DHCP service
  • Integrated Routing Platform
  • Scalability Assurance
  • Smart Provisioning
  • Smart Dashboard
  • Full Multi-Hypervisor Support (VMware, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen 4)
  • Integrated metering, billing and invoicing
  • Integration with external billing/CRM systems
  • Multi-tier Reseller capabilities
  • Smart Filtering
  • Full customer, reseller, and administrator portals
  • Bento Boxes
  • Customer/Admin/System API