Flexiant, an international provider of cloud orchestration software, today reveals how it is opening its platform to support OpenStack to solve the business challenges associated with the open source cloud management solution.

Service providers must have the functionality to commercialize their cloud offering, but the core OpenStack project currently lacks the ability to meet this business need. Flexiant announced its roadmap to be the orchestration layer on top of OpenStack that will enable service providers to launch differentiated cloud services, quickly and at scale.

OpenStack is one choice for service providers to control large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources. Flexiant will offer the same functionality it already delivers for VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and its own native implementation for KVM and Xen to deliver the level of orchestration and service differentiation that service providers require from OpenStack. By overlaying OpenStack with Flexiant’s advanced functionality, service providers can compete more effectively by commercializing and differentiating their cloud services in weeks, rather than months or years.

George Knox, CEO of Flexiant comments: “Flexiant has kept a close eye on the way OpenStack has developed over the last three years. It’s clear there’s a market appetite for it, but we’re also seeing a lot of frustration emerging from the OpenStack adopters as they realize that, at best, OpenStack is a toolkit, and is functionally incomplete. For service providers this means it’s difficult to get to market using it alone.”

He continues: “Millions of dollars are spent, and in some cases are completely wasted, developing services on OpenStack. Service providers don’t typically have the same technical and developmental resources, or funds available, as vendors such as IBM, HP and Dell, and as such this DIY approach isn’t working for them. Even those working with hardware vendors to deliver services are struggling to do it in fewer than 18 months. Flexiant wants to give service providers choice and help them commercialize their cloud services quickly. We will do this by offering a rapidly deployable, functionally rich, service provider ready solution, underpinned by OpenStack, as well as our own platform.”

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is a stable, reliable, proven, feature-rich platform that is simple to understand, simple to deploy and simple to use. Version 4, which launched earlier this month, gives service providers access to a wide range of third party plugins to customise differentiated services, specific to their customers’ needs. Features include an open and scalable platform, flexible interface, integrated metering and billing, reseller capabilities and application management.

Knox concludes: “OpenStack’s shortcomings around solving business challenges certainly gave us food for thought, but Flexiant has drawn on its own heritage, expertise and experience in the service provider market to help our customers get ahead. At the same time we’re helping OpenStack towards greater maturity, so it is only right that we should also assist in the open source effort by supporting OpenStack and contributing code.”

Flexiant has now joined the OpenStack Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor and support is expected in Summer 2014.

Download the whitepaper on the OpenStack Log Jam for more information on the business challenges for the service provider associated with the platform.