A one-stop guide to show you how the latest version Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator can arm you with a platform to turn innovative ideas into revenue generating services and easily.
This is the decade of the service provider and with no enterprise predicting internal IT growth, service providers are sitting on the edge of a $30 billion market opportunity (in some cases analysts estimate this much higher). As value migrates to the service provider in the form of private, hybrid and public cloud based IT, the requirement for a cloud orchestration solution that enables management of the entire infrastructure, application and third party plugins increases. Flexiant’s entire purpose is to focus on helping service providers create a cloud services business their customers will love. The launch of V5 of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator allows service providers to:
What’s New in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator?
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5 is now available!
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5 marks the completion of the portfolio of deep integration with Odin technology. V5 now integrates with Odin Automation using APS 2.0. Odin customers can use the Odin control panel to install and configure infrastructure and resources via Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. Any customer using Odin Automation can now launch differentiated hypervisor-agnostic infrastructure as a service (IaaS) using the tightly integrated Odin and Flexiant Solution. This comes of the back of the general availability of the integrated Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator and Odin Cloud Server (PCS) virtualization and storage news, marking the world’s first cloud orchestration solution to support Parallel’s container technology. For more information, visit our Odin’s page.
With V5, Flexiant extends its software defined networking (SDN) capabilities to the VMware platform and adds official support for VMware vSphere 5.5
With the enhanced REST API, API keys and token based authentication support, Flexiant makes it far more easy and secure to integrate with the platform. End users can securely gain access to the platform without handing over private information.
In-depth event-based analytics tool, giving service providers business intelligence on their Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator platform activities. For more information, read our press release.
Flexiant is now the platform for service providers to offer a complete range of cloud services to accelerate revenue growth 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 to secure new customers and revenue streams. As the only management software needed to power a cloud, service providers can now compete against Amazon’s ease of use while differentiating in the cloud industry with customizable software that allows them to deploy the right solutions for their customers. Read the press release.
Read an overview of the latest features and functionality we have included for v5 in our continued effort to arm service providers with a platform that helps turn innovative ideas into revenue generating services quickly and easily.
Flexiant ‘Trigger’ technology enables plugin capability to allow service providers to differentiate through individual customization and ecosystem support Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is a fully customizable platform to meet a service provider’s unique needs. Service providers can customize the user interface (UI), the billing system and now with the launch of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5, apply customization based on business logic and additional plugins to enable ecosystem partners. Flexiant has introduced new trigger technology within Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator to allow external systems as well as users to receive notifications or requests when customizable ‘trigger’ events occur within the platform. Based on the Flexiant Development Language (FDL) which itself is a layer on top of the popular Lua programming language, short and simple plug-ins can be written to apply logic to cloud management. Service providers can easily establish rules that trigger activity such as notifications that an event has occurred, automated provisioning of resources, applying workflows, etc. Triggers can also be applied to other systems within a service provider’s infrastructure so, for example, using a trigger; you can easily write plug-ins on top of the management platform for back-up infrastructure, billing systems, data center infrastructure and customer management or monitoring. Trigger technology is the landmark feature within Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5 because we now offer the ability for service providers to easily modify and extend their platform based on their own needs, increasing the ability to differentiate, and to deliver the services their customers want. See how this plugin integration technology can help your business.
Smart service providers are already gaining reach through other organizations’ existing relationships and resources by maximizing resellers’ vertical and industry-specific expertise and geographic coverage without requiring heavy investment in sales and marketing. This model offers huge possibilities in terms of revenue growth without significant investment to build your own resources and presence. V5 enhances the capabilities Flexiant already offers service providers looking to reseller cloud services. Read more about these capabilities below or by downloading our whitepaper on the 10 Must-Haves Needed to Support a Cloud Reseller Channel.
It is now easier for service providers to on-board customers based on their geography and billing requirements. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5 continues to support service providers’ requirements for global reach. The latest version enhances the internationalization function by offering providers and their resellers the ability to deliver services in multiple languages based on what the end user wants to consume. Flexiant ships with English, Spanish, French German and Russian capabilities and additional languages can be added by Flexiant or by customers and third parties. Service providers do not need to set languages themselves, but instead can let the end-customer select the language of their choice. This is particularly relevant for a multiple reseller model where the service provider is unaware of how customers will consume service down the sales line. We have always been at the forefront of internationalization offering multiple languages and currencies for cloud service providers, but now it extends to the reseller business. Each cloud service provider reseller can offer their customers the cloud infrastructure and they can select and manage the services they want in the language and currency they want.
Version 4 of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator now incorporates payment provider plug-ins to interface with payment provider systems to allow different plug-ins to be created for handling merchant transactions. Service providers, using the Flexiant Development Language (FDL) can now plug in any payment providers required. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 4.0 ships with Stripe, Paypal, Inpay and Datacash included and additional payment providers can easily be added by third parties as required using FDL Plugins Service providers now have an easier to use payment platform directly within Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator that integrates with multiple payment providers. This enables greater scalability and flexibility with the internal Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator billing system, which is included free of charge in all editions of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. This is particularly beneficial to resellers who do not have their own subscription or metered based billing platforms.
The latest version of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator offers support for complex billing scenarios enabling reseller/distributor type models. Where a service provider resells infrastructure to another reseller and then another (a reseller of a reseller of a reseller for example), Flexiant can support the complex nature of billing for this. With the ability to manage, meter and bill for the customers, resellers, distributors and service providers involved, Flexiant is continuing to enable new routes to market. Service providers no longer need to worry about complex situations. Instead, they can benefit from full transparency of how resources are metered and billed accordingly.
V5 extends the existing powerful billing system to now include full subscription billing capabilities. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is the only cloud management platform that offers a complete PAYG/metered and subscription based billing system built directly into the platform at no extra cost. This now means that service providers can provide whatever metering and billing solution their customers and or resellers require to grow their business.
Flexiant has always enabled service providers to differentiate their services. One key way of doing that is via our customizable UI. As part of the continuing efforts to improve this further, it is now possible for service providers and their resellers to not only provide context sensitive help within the UI, but for this to be fully brandable and white labeled as required. This includes the ability to change the languages, descriptions and terminology used. This continues to enable service providers to differentiate and empower their customers and resellers to take full advantage of the advanced self service capabilities Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator delivers.
In addition to the above new features, Flexiant’s V5 also now includes generally availability for Ceph and support for Chef.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V5 now makes generally available support for Ceph, a distributed block store, object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability. Support for the open source distributed storage technology will allow Flexiant’s customers to store their customer data including disks and images on the Ceph distributed storage system. The benefits include reduced hardware costs and increased scalability by eliminating centralized storage. Preferences vary for cloud service providers and customers have different requirements and considerations to balance – cost, scalability, resilience and performance. As a result, we continue to enable more and more storage options for our customers. While this type of innovative storage solution is not for everyone, it does give our customers more options. Ceph is a disruptive and leading edge technology with significant advantages. Our support for Ceph illustrates Flexiant’s commitment to offer our customers multiple storage options as opposed to railroading them into a single proprietary storage solution, and to work with best of breed partners in delivering combined solutions.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has added direct support for the Chef configuration management tool from Opscode. By combining Opscodes configuration management capabilities, with Flexiant’s server, network, storage and application blueprint orchestration, significant new use cases and possibilities are enabled including single click complex application deployment involving multiple servers, networks and resources all from a friendly user interface. This integration removes the complexity of application deployment, now offering self-service functionality. The benefit to the service provider is that they can now build applications that include the network and infrastructure as well as the configuration management from Chef and ensures it is all configured correctly using prebuilt templates. It also enables end users and ISVs to build, publish and share application blueprints that take full advantage of Chef’s capabilities.
In addition to launching V5, Flexiant also announced its product roadmap that includes support for OpenStack in Summer 2014.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Helps Service Providers Commercialize the Cloud by Opening the Platform to OpenStack and Adding Functional Feature-Rich Services OpenStack is one choice for service providers to control large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources. By overlaying OpenStack with Flexiant’s functionality, Flexiant will offer service providers the advanced functionality not currently available from OpenStack so that they can spin out fully functional feature-rich cloud services, and get a differentiated cloud service to market in weeks, rather than months or years. View our infographic or download our whitepaper to find out more about information.
For more information on Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, view our software feature tours or download our datasheet.