Research

Academic Licence

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is available for non-commercial use via the Academic Licence for cloud management at no cost. With this licence, Flexiant are now able to help advance research projects and ensure that academics and students are exposed to commercially current and complete software. Learn more here.

What is FP7

FP7, is a European Commission funded programme to facilitate the co-operation of the very best in industry and academia to push the state of the art in technology and put Europe on a level playing field with the rest of the technology world. The European Commission partially funds industrial partners and fully funds academic partners in projects to build cutting edge research and integration offerings, products, and output. This allows industrial partners to become world leaders in their fields whilst giving academia a “guiding” hand as to what is relevant in the market place.

Flexiant’s Involvement

Involved since 2010, Flexiant helps to guide projects in their shape and form to ensure that the output of the project can be realised in the marketplace. We also allow project partners to utilise the state of the art cloud platform that Flexiant hosts. In addition, Flexiant works closely with partners to help realise and integrate any new functionality that the project requires via the comprehensive API.

As one of the first European providers of a public Cloud Platform, being involved in FP7 projects presents us as the thought leaders in our field. Furthermore, Flexiant gains access to a very high calibre of industrial partners such as BT, ATOS, SAP, Telefonica, Orange, and France telecom. These peers work to drive projects along with many highly regarded academic partners.

Ongoing Projects

Optimis

This project presents the fundamentals for a toolkit for scalable and dependable service platforms and architectures that enable flexible and dynamic provisioning of cloud services, known as cloud bursting. The innovations behind the toolkit are aimed at optimizing the whole service life cycle, including service construction, deployment, and operation, on a basis of aspects such as trust, risk, eco-efficiency and cost.  This project is aimed to finish in summer 2013.

4CaaSt

4CaaSt offers an application marketplace for service providers to use to focus on their business (both the software and the service monetization), leaving the underlying complexity of infrastructure and platforms out of their concerns.  This marketplace’s main purpose is to build an innovative framework for creating, marketing, deploying and managing applications on the Cloud, both over platform products and platform as a service.  This project is in its third year.

CumuloNimbo

This project is known as a distributed database solution that aims at developing a radically new Platform as a Service that will provide high scalability (100+ service nodes) without sacrificing data consistency and ease of programming. The targeted PaaS will be a multi-tier software stack for cloud computing providing the same functionality to current, software multi-tier stacks, such as Java EE, SAP Netweaver or .NET.  The goal of this solution is to make number crunching faster and easier with no need for businesses to invest in physical hardware.

PaaSage

PaaSage delivers an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications. The platform and the accompanying methodology allow model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing Cloud infrastructures.

CELAR

CELAR will explore ways to provide automated resource allocation for cloud applications. Resources will be kept to a minimum to ensure cost effectiveness and “green” environmentally friendliness. The project will define methodology and build a toolset for developers to build applications on “enabled” IaaS platforms using minimum requirements. The outcome of this project will be open source.

MODAClouds

MODAClouds Current Cloud’s offer is becoming day by day wider providing a vibrant technical environment, where SMEs can create innovative solutions and evolve their services. Cloud promises cheap and flexible services to end-users at a much larger scale than before. However, Cloud business models and technologies are still in their initial hype and characterized by critical early stage issues, which pose specific challenges and require advanced software engineering methods.

The main goal of MODAClouds is to provide methods, a decision support system, an open source IDE and run-time environment for the high-level design, early prototyping, semi-automatic code generation, and automatic deployment of applications on multi-Clouds with guaranteed QoS.

These projects are partially funded by the European Commission under FP7 contracts