The Innovation Journey of an SME in H2020
Flexiant believes it has hit an inflection point in demand for our existing capabilities. We added multi-cloud capabilities in 2014, and now offer granular metering and billing, blueprinting, global DNS, and auto-scaling. The multicloud/application deployment space very much involved in the the last round of FP7 funding was crucial to the commercial release of our Concerto product. MODAClouds, PaaSage and CELAR are three FP7 projects that we are involved with, each of which is now three years old. These are all linked projects; all cloud agnostic, and dealing with application deployment. The output of these prepared Flexiant for the development and release of our own commercial multi-cloud application deployment and management tool. This was Concerto. Flexiant, therefore, has a keen understanding of the ‘as is’ situation through our work with customers and partners, meaning that current challenges are clear and linked to real-world end-user limitations and issues. This allows us to continuously deliver new features and functionality that benefit cloud service providers. We are now researching and validating (with IBM) some of these technology-driven opportunities and their feasibility for integration to the cloud. Our roadmap here is clear. We have begun to focus on automating the complex setup of Apache Spark (the single most active project in the Apache Software Foundation, or among Big Data open source projects) using Chef recipes and to elastically scale a cluster. We love Google Kubernetes, and when it comes to managing a cluster of Linux containers as a single system to accelerate Dev and simplify Ops we love it even more. We have begun working with prediction.io to incorporate a machine learning framework on top of Spark for developers and data scientists to build and deploy predictive applications, employ scalable data collection and utilise data analytics. This area is fresh and vital, and these are the technology-driven opportunities that we see shaping the Cloud in 2016 and beyond. Flexiant are committed to the Cloud supporting the anticipated high traffic volumes and in general handling expected data levels coming from the IoT domain in future years. For Flexiant, when there are opportunities to provide over-the-top content from cloud-based solutions as an end-to-end user network service, this enables many opportunities for new businesses and cloud licensees. We have several technological solutions both new and expansions coming up on our internal roadmap will advance our cloud-based POSIX distributed storage techniques to cater for application portability, data storage reliability and redundancy, introduce Spark-as-a-service, utilise network load balancing and manage very exciting large scale automated workload handling across multiple locations. We are keen to keep all innovations agnostic of cloud provider technologies and foster interoperability and we plan to be aided in our ambition by making successful partnerships in the Horizon 2020 framework. We are adapting Concerto, our multi cloud hosted platform that gives DevOps the fastest way to deploy and automate applications across multiple clouds in a way that is both resilient and secure, to make it easy to use Apache Spark across any cloud. Version 5 of our mature Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator software released earlier this year, ushered in a new user interface/experience, as well as configuration plug-ins that can be written by third parties and effectively customize the ability to add controlled business processes. Also new is a multi-tier storage capacity enabling customers to offer disks that are tied to specific storage units (such as SSD) and can throttle IOPS by policy, allowing service providers to sell different products with different thresholds for different IOPS performance. Due to our market positioning, mature technologies and our successful EU project involvement Flexiant are one of the strongest commercial partners.in H2020.
Keywords
ict, h2020, flexiant
Countries
Spain, United Kingdom