Flexiant yesterday announced the release of Flexiant 2.0, the updated and highly polished version of their cloud software. Flexiant is a UK based cloud software provider with their heritage from the hosting market. With this Flexiant is telling the world that they are a serious competitor in the Federated Cloud Ecosystem and they are going in full speed to attract the service providers to their platform. It is too early to say how well they will do in a segment dominated by open source platforms like OpenStack and CloudStack but they are putting out a really strong product in the market. The level of flexibility offered by their platform could be very attractive to many service providers. Unlike other cloud platforms, they not only offer some interesting features like highly customizable UI, flexibility, etc., they also offer professional services based on domain expertise so that service providers can go well beyond infrastructure services and offer higher value products .
Some of the key features of this release includes:
- Single pane of glass
- Multi hypervisor
- Multi Cluster
- Highly configurable UI
- Flexible self service
- Multi level metering and billing
- Fine grained control
- Application management
- Intelligent workload placement
Even though some of the features like application management and intelligent workload placements are in the early stages of their evolution (not in terms of maturity but it terms of potential to do really interesting things in the future), I am pretty excited because it fits well into how IT will change as we have Intelligent Platforms available, converting IT itself into a complex adaptive systems. Some of the features I see in the Flexiant platform fits very well into this theme and I am really excited to see how they develop these features in the future.
Their presence in UK gives them a strong footing in Europe where federated cloud ecosystems are norm and I am sure they are focusing on the US market where OpenStacks and CloudStacks of the world dominate the mindshare. People whose thinking is shaped by the economics of scarcity are skeptical about any additional competition but my thinking is shaped by the economics of abundance. With such a worldview, I see Flexiant’s push in the infrastructure market as a welcome move as the competition ultimately benefits end users in terms of variety and rapid innovation. I will keep a closer watch on this platform in the years to come.
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