Flexiant has acquired, in entirety, the Tapp technology and business from Besol Sl. This includes the whole Executive and Engineering teams and customers. This was a cash and stock transaction.
Tapp is a technology platform that allows users to manage their multi cloud infrastructures independently of their cloud provider. Through the Tapp platform, service providers of all kinds are now able to deploy and enable their customers to manage their cloud infrastructures seamlessly, in a completely new user-friendly experience.
Tapp capabilities include many features and functions that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service afterwards. With the goal of guaranteeing results consistency, independently of the chosen cloud providers, Tapp’s features are abstracted from the infrastructure layer. In fact, Tapp provides a comprehensive set of application-focused tools, from load balancing and application performance-based autoscaling 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.
Tapp enables users to configure, deploy, manage and monitor cloud resources across nine different clouds including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid, Joyent, IBM, Digital Ocean and Linode, in addition to CMPs like OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, VMWare and Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. Tapp covers about 90% of the cloud-user market.
Tapp supports Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as one of the available infrastructure backends. Any Service Provider who stands up Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its data centers will be eligibile to be one of the cloud infrastructure providers included in the Tapp technology platform. Moreover, the Flexiant ownership of the full technology stack, from the bare metal up to the application level, will allow the company to deliver unique value through the two products combined together.
Flexiant is committed in its belief that this is the decade of the service provider. We believe that certain functional areas are underserved and one of these is service provider ready, multi-cloud management. Flexiant, already recognized as the leading trendsetter in cloud orchestration and management will use the Tapp technology and skills to accelerate the Flexiant innovation roadmap.
Flexiant will sell a multi cloud solution underpinned by Tapp technology to the Service Provider market, broken down into MSPs, Telcos and Hosting companies. We see a particular value mostly for MSPs market who don’t want to invest in their own infrastructure, using any of the available target clouds to drive value added services on top. The immediate focus is providing a multi-cloud management solution with an increased range of compelling, sector specific services, which service providers can use to differentiate and drive revenue.
We believe that MSPs and Telcos are uniquely placed to capture cloud revenue and opportunity and that this market has been underserved. Some do not currently have the range of enabling software solutions needed to maximize their market position.
With their unique customer first view of service delivery rather than technology first, MSPs and Telcos have a deep understanding of their customers’ business priorities and critical SLAs. Equally they are experts 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 them manage the cloud services provider. Our move to acquire Tapp technology will extend the management solutions we already provide to both MSPs and Telcos across multi-cloud deployments so that they and their customers can decide what infrastructure and vendor to use based on their customer’s unique business requirements.
The initial multi cloud solution will be ‘as-a-service’ from a Flexiant enabled data center. That means that Service Providers can sign up (as opposed to buying software licenses) for the Tapp service and they will be able to launch their own branded Tapp-powered control panel without buying any piece of hardware. In fact, they’ll also be able to select which cloud providers to offer to their customers, including – of course – all those that are powered by Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator.
Cloud federation requires one provider to wholesale or rent computing resources to another cloud provider. Those resources become a temporary or permanent extension of the buyer’s cloud computing environment, depending on the specific federation agreement between providers.
Issues with federation includes commoditization of the industry, inconsistent service levels, support and responsiveness, quality of service, workload compatibility and distribution, transaction overhead, competition and cooperation, maintaining margin, legal jurisdiction and of course, federated billing. This model suggests that MSPs will become irrelevant as customers self serve in a cloud consumption model. We believe that this is wrong and is an upside down model where technology is the starting point rather than a real understanding of the customer.
The joint Flexiant and Tapp approach to multi-cloud management is different because MSPs, with their initial focus on customer requirements rather than technology is a sustainable model that creates value for the end customers. The MSP multi-cloud solution that Flexant and Tapp will deliver will give MSPs the capability to extend their services into multi-cloud management.
Integration will be completed quickly and new product will be rolled out from Summer 2014 onwards.
Existing Tapp customers will continue to receive the level of support that they have at present. Furthermore they will be able to benefit from the increased development of the joint Tapp and Flexiant solutions.
Flexiant do not intend to continue the Tapp brand and will replace this with Flexiant specific branding over time.
Flexiant and Tapp are already busy onboarding Tapp into Flexiant and developing joint technology roadmaps. In the weeks ahead these will result in further announcements including greater detail on the solutions that Flexiant will be rolling out as a result of this acquisition.