Managing more than one cloud

The reality of future cloud utilisation by most companies is likely to be based around the use of multiple cloud services, and indeed multiple clouds, from a number of different service providers and vendors. What follows from this, of course, is that one of the most important capabilities any business will require is the ability to manage and integrate those clouds to provide a coherent, collaborative service.

Providing those tools is now the target for Flexiant, which is already part-way along that path with the provision of its cloud orchestrator services. It has now opted to complement this with the acquisition of the Tapp multi-cloud management technology and business from Besol Sl. The cash and stock acquisition includes the migration of technology, staff and customers to Flexiant.  

On many occasions Flexiant has stated that “this is the decade of the service provider,” and the move to acquire Tapp increases the capability of the company to enable managed service providers (MSPs), telcos and others to manage workloads across multiple cloud vendors and geographies. It will use this acquisition to further accelerate a roadmap aimed at delivering an even broader range of solutions for the cloud service provider.

“We believe that MSP’s are uniquely placed to capture cloud revenue and opportunity and that this market has been underserved. MSPs do not have the range of enabling software solutions needed to maximise their market position,” Flexiant’s CEO George Knox, said.

“With their unique customer-first view of service delivery rather than technology first, MSPs have a deep understanding of their customers’ business priorities and critical SLAs. Equally MSPs are expert at managing, on behalf of their customers, multiple, competing IT vendor relationships. It is a natural extension to this customer relationship to also offer customer services to transition to the cloud and to manage multiple cloud service providers.

“At the moment there are limited solutions to help the MSP manage the cloud services provider.  Our move to acquire Tapp technology will extend the management solutions we already provide to MSPs across multi-cloud deployments so that they can decide what infrastructure and vendor to use based on their customer’s unique business requirements,” Knox added.  

In the opinion of Tapp’s  CEO, Hector Rodriguez, the combination of the company’s automated multi-cloud platform and Flexiant’s cloud orchestration will deliver significant value to both MSPs and global telcos. By joining a larger organisation with the clout of Flexiant’s, he sees this as providing a truly EU-born power play in infrastructure cloud computing.

Tapp’s capabilities include features and functions that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service afterwards. With the goal of guaranteeing consistency, independently of the chosen cloud providers, its features are totally abstracted from the infrastructure layer.

It provides a comprehensive set of application-focused tools, from load balancing and auto-scaling to DNS management and File Delivery Network. One of the most interesting capabilities lies in the extensive use of Chef for application blueprinting within Tapp. This enables application blueprints to be deployable on multiple clouds, without relying too heavily on provider-specific OS images. 

The combination of Flexiant’s technology with that of Tapp is expected to give service providers a range of opportunities to secure and grow existing cloud services revenue and margins as well as create and defend new revenue streams.

Flexiant will integrate the Tapp technology into its cloud management platform to offer multi-tenant cloud solutions so MSPs can select the right infrastructure solution for the customer – whether it is their own infrastructure or that of a trusted cloud service provider already running Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator.

Furthermore, the company has combined the two roadmaps to generate a range of sector-specific services that will allow service providers using Flexiant to differentiate their offers in the battleground for cloud revenue.

Service providers can expect a new and comprehensive set of cloud services using Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator and Tapp starting in summer 2014.