The new Extility Foundation Edition will give smaller service providers the opportunity to compete in the provision of agile cloud services and will enable corporate users to build, manage and deploy private, public or hybrid clouds effortlessly – without high upfront costs. The Foundation Edition can be up and running within an hour.

Flexiant’s innovative cloud software, Extility, incorporates all the key components of cloud infrastructure into a simple virtual platform solution. Highly automated, Extility enables service providers to offer cost effective, on demand and flexible cloud services to their customers.

For enterprises looking to build their own cloud, Extility can be easily integrated into existing IT management systems, capitalising on existing investment and providing extensive flexibility to meet the challenges of today and the demands of the future.

A three-month Free Trial of this exciting product is available for download from the Flexiant web site – www.flexiant.com.
Flexiant pioneered the development of cloud computing in 2007, when it launched Europe’s first public cloud, FlexiScale. Flexiant’s flagship product, Extility Service Provider Edition, launched in 2010, already offers a proven, reliable and secure ‘orchestration and automation’ solution to managed service providers and data centre operators.

Extility Service Provider Edition continues to be available to service providers who require greater customisation and tailoring. In addition to having greater flexibility, the Service Provider Edition offers a full multi-currency billing system, white labelling facilities to support multiple resellers, greater scalability and multi-hypervisor capability supporting KVM, Xen and VMware.

Foundation Edition customers will be able to upgrade to the Service Provider Edition at any time.

Robert Karssiens, Flexiant’s Director of Sales and Marketing says: “We’re passionate about making quality, reliable cloud services available to every business. Our Foundation Edition lets anyone try Extility – they can download and use it, free, for three months – and then just get on with selling cloud services.”

For more information contact: Sarah Lee.

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients across the United States. It will introduce Flexiant’s Extility cloud platform these clients, helping them to develop their own private and public clouds.

Robert Karssiens, Flexiant’s Director of Sales & Marketing says: “Resellers like DSA Technologies are essential to our international growth plans. This agreement will help introduce our Extility platform, already used extensively in Europe, to a new and demanding market.”

Flexiant, headquartered in Scotland, developed Europe’s first cloud platform in 2007 and is one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.

DSA Technologies’ CEO, Michael Pearson says: “We pride ourselves on finding the right technologies for our clients, to help them in their own businesses. Flexiant’s Extility cloud computing platform will let our clients create exactly the clouds they need.”

The two partners were introduced through Phoenix Fire, a business development agency specialising in partner channel development for the US technology sector. Flexiant entered a partnership agreement with Phoenix Fire at the end of 2010, to help find quality resellers for its products.

Flexiant’s Extility software is a licensed cloud computing platform delivering all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Licensees of Extility not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business; the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they are able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years.

Flexiant also offers a public cloud service, FlexiScale, which enables start-ups and SMEs to grow from one server to one thousand servers in seconds – critical for organisations offering streaming video, social networking or SaaS, and ideal for a wealth of other applications.

FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual dedicated servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure required from customers, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

In addition to a range of other deployments, Extility is currently being used as a test bed by the European Commission on three multi-million pound FP7 research and development projects aimed at driving forward the adoption of cloud computing across Europe.

For more information contact: Lauren Cormack.

About DSA Technologies

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients US-wide. DSA has grown from a professional services only firm into a full-service solution provider offering complete technology solutions for: strategic planning, cloud-readiness assessment, project design, product sales, professional services implementation, managed services monitoring, post-implementation support and on-going staff services.

“Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant” marries an application layer from Standing Cloud with Flexiant’s Extility cloud product. Extility customers will be able to find and immediately use around 100 popular web applications—WordPress, SugarCRM, DotProject and OpenBravo, to name a few—complete with built-in monitoring and management tools that ease system administration headaches. Developers can use PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, and Python to support rapid testing and live deployment. Pricing starts at $38.95 per month.

Together, Standing Cloud and Flexiant aim to remove the mystery of the cloud for “informal buyers” who have struggled with accessing cloud technology. Forrester Research defines this group as including application developers, innovative business users and service providers.

The ““Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant” integration includes a separate Flexiant-branded area of the Standing Cloud web site, and offers the ability to register and run a free trial of the various applications, before opting for full hosting. This allows users to see how flexible and immediate cloud application provisioning really can be.

“Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant is an exciting new way to bring the promise of cloud computing to business users and developers. By connecting Standing Cloud’s point and click interface to their infrastructure, Flexiant’s customers no longer need to have system administration skills to use it productively,” said David J. Jilk, CEO of Standing Cloud.

As well, earlier this year, Standing Cloud began expanding its support for data centers in the UK and Europe so that users could take advantage of the company’s ability to restore their application in minutes to another cloud in case of downtime on their primary cloud provider. For more info, read “Standing Cloud Facilitates Privacy Law Compliance in the EuroCloud.”

“We found we had a lot in common with Standing Cloud, in our determination to look at things from the users’ point of view. We’ve created a service that ‘just works’, that doesn’t need a lot of knowledge or skills. You shouldn’t have to hire someone to manage your cloud computing, you should be able to do it yourself. And with Standing Cloud’s innovative application layer, you can,” said Alex Bligh, Flexiant CEO.

Flexiant’s flagship software product, Extility, allows licensees to build their own cloud and sell cloud services under their own brand. The cloud computing platform delivers all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to provision and reconfigure servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

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For more information contact: Sarah Lee.

About Standing Cloud

Standing Cloud is the only platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables cloud users to deploy, manage, customise and/or develop applications on a variety of cloud services and with several programming languages. The service supports PHP, Java, Ruby, and Python, as well as 80+ complete open source applications that can be deployed by end users with a few clicks. Target customers include business users who want an easy way to automatically deploy and manage SaaS; developers who customise existing open source applications or develop their own from scratch; and IT professionals in search of a time-saving way to deploy applications and development environments for teams within their organisation.

Flexiant was one of only four Champion vendors out of 13 Innovators. The Innovator category exists “to identify vendors that have demonstrated innovative product strengths which act as their competitive advantage in appealing to niche segments of the market. These vendors are poised to emerge as leaders,” the research group says.

Flexiant is in good company, with the list of Innovators including such big names as Amazon, Rackspace and IBM.

The four Innovators identified as Champions “receive high scores for most evaluation criteria and offer excellent value. They have a strong market presence and are usually the trend setters for the industry”, Info-Tech says.

Flexiant developed Europe’s first cloud platform over four years ago and remains one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers worldwide. The company’s pioneering cloud platform is now being used by the EU across a range of multi-million Euro FP7 projects as a testbed to speed up cloud computing’s adoption rate by enterprise-level companies across Europe.
Info-Tech listed Flexiant’s strengths as its usability, the ability to perform live recoveries and fast reboots, its high flexibility in choice of CPU and storage, and the use of persistent storage as a default selection.

Info-Tech also praised Flexiant’s highly granular control, allowing easy account management, the controls for firewalls and disk encryption which are easy to use and modify, and Flexiant’s control panel, designed on a “virtual data centre approach”.

“Most functions normally requiring a command line of configuration utility within the operating system can be done in the control panel instead, such as adding IP addresses to an interface,” Info-Tech says.

Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscape reports recognise outstanding vendors in the technology marketplace. Assessing vendors by the strength of their offering and their strategy for the enterprise, Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscapes pay tribute to the contribution of exceptional vendors in a particular category.

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For more information contact: Lauren Cormack

About Flexiant

Flexiant is a software and services company, one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five worldwide. Its public cloud, FlexiScale, was Europe’s first cloud platform and was launched in 2007. In March 2010 the company launched its flagship product, Extility, a software product that allows licensees to build their own cloud and sell cloud services under their own brand.

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 8,000 organisations worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is the global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech Research Group has a thirteen-year history of delivering quality research and is one of North America’s fastest growing full-service IT analyst firms.

This news follows Flexiant’s long anticipated entry into the US market during the last quarter of 2010. Flexiant, headquartered in Scotland, developed Europe’s first cloud platform in 2007 and is one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.

The company will showcase its flagship product, Extility, a licensed virtualised cloud platform, at Cloud Connect. Extility helps companies reduce start up costs, capital expenditure and energy consumption, while slashing operating costs and significantly shrinking carbon footprint.

In addition to a range of other enterprise deployments, Extility, is currently being used as a test bed by the European Commission on three multi-million pound FP7 research and development projects aimed at driving forward the adoption of cloud computing across Europe.

Robert Karssiens, Director of Sales and Marketing comments: “As growth of the cloud computing market accelerates rapidly, Cloud Connect is a forum where we can continue to shape the direction of the industry. Flexiant is one of the early pioneers of cloud computing in Europe and is now sharply focused on the US, a key market in our aggressive growth strategy.”

The lineup at Cloud Connect features some of the top minds in cloud computing, people defining cloud computing today as well as the companies leveraging the cloud to drive their business objectives.

Produced by UBM TechWeb, Cloud Connect is the defining event of the cloud computing industry. As both a conference and an exhibition, Cloud Connect’s goal is to chart the course of cloud computing’s development by bringing together enterprise IT professionals, developers, infrastructure providers and cloud computing innovators.

Cloud computing is changing the way companies look at how they address cost, scalability and the models that underpin successful software and hardware companies. A recent report predicts that by 2012, 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will pay for some cloud computing service and 30% percent will pay for cloud computing infrastructure. Gartner, 2010

Cloud Connect will take place March 7-10, 2011 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

For more information contact Sarah Lee.

Flexiant developed Europe’s first cloud platform over four years ago and remains one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers worldwide. Flexiant’s pioneering cloud platform is now being used by the EU across a range of multi-million Euro FP7 projects as a testbed to speed up cloud computing’s adoption rate by enterprise level companies throughout Europe.

Tackling head on the issue of virtual machine sprawl, Extility 1.3’s foreign keys feature allows data centre operators and their end-user customers to orchestrate virtual resources and ensure they are always deployed where they are needed.

The new foreign keys facility is important for making best use of the speed, economy and flexibility of a cloud platform. Foreign keys allow the cloud provider and enterprise user not only to define and tag content but also to build its own logic on top. This will allow the user to query resources active within the company – where four departments could have four separate accounts and four virtual data centres working on one project. By tagging resources the enterprise can drill down and see how these are actually being used rather than having them disappear into the black hole of departmental budgets.

Tony Lucas, Flexiant’s founder explains: “All data centres already have substantial investments in software, hardware and other IT infrastructure. Our challenge is to develop systems which allow organisations to benefit from the agility, flexibility and economy of a cloud computing platform while making the best use of their existing capital investment.”

Flexiant’s VLAN interworking feature will allow integration of existing physical servers and the cloud at the network level, allowing customers to move fully or partially to a cloud platform, in a seamless manner. This means end customers can pilot virtualisation by moving to the cloud those services that will bring the greatest benefit, whilst retaining on physical infrastructure those services which are better suited to it. Services that are most likely to benefit from a move to the cloud include those that may run just once a month and can leave physical servers idle for long periods; when moved to the cloud, such services would share physical resources.

“Whilst many IT resources can be moved to the cloud with ease, some workloads do not benefit from virtualisation,” adds Lucas. “And, understandably, customers may be reluctant to re-architect their entire infrastructure, preferring a more gradual transition to cloud-based services. VLAN interworking allows customers the flexibility to pick and choose which services they put on the cloud.”

A production-ready cloud platform can be both capital and time intensive, a fact that often discourages data centre operators from trialling cloud technology. Extility 1.3’s small foot-print install feature means data centre operators can pilot a cloud offering with relatively little investment in time or capital before developing this deployment into a fully-fledged cloud platform for their customers.

Lucas continues: “Extility is a mature platform and with every release we are building something even more powerful. We are enabling business intelligence faster than ever and adding high level functionality for our licensees and their end users.”

For more information visit http://www.flexiant.com or email Sarah Lee.

The company will run a live demo on the FlexiScale public cloud platform, showcasing its flagship software, Extility, from control panel to billing engine.

Flexiant, headquartered in Scotland, developed Europe’s first cloud platform in 2007 and is one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.  Extility helps companies reduce start up costs, capital expenditure and energy consumption, while slashing operating costs and significantly shrinking carbon footprint.

In addition to a range of other deployments, Extility, is currently being used as a test bed by the European Commission on three multi-million pound FP7 research and development projects aimed at driving forward the adoption of cloud computing across Europe.

Cloud Expo Europe is the only European event dedicated to all aspects of cloud computing, from cloud in the data centre, storage and security to open source and the cloud.

Robert Karssiens, Director of Sales and Marketing comments:  ”We are seeing increasing interest from all sectors as people switch onto the possibilities created by cloud computing. This is an exciting time to be working in the industry and we are looking forward to the discussion and debate that will happen at Cloud Expo.

In 2009 Cloud Expo Europe brought together some of the industry’s most respected luminaries and key industry leaders such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Sun, SugarCRM and many more to present the case for cloud computing.

Cloud computing is changing the way companies look at how they address cost, scalability and the models that underpin successful software and hardware companies.  A recent report predicts that by 2012, 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will pay for some cloud computing service and 30% percent will pay for cloud computing infrastructure. Gartner, 2010.

For more information email cat@hottinroof.co.uk.

Powered by Flexiant’s flagship technology “Extility”, FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

Key new features in the 2.1 software release include:

• Ten additional configurations of virtual servers, bringing the total to sixteen;
• Up to 8 virtual CPUs per virtual server;
• A metadata service allowing customers and image vendors to pass a hierarchy of data to virtual servers for dynamic runtime configuration;
• Support for Cohesive-FT’s VPN-Cubed virtual server images, allowing customer controlled networking across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds.

The release also includes a number of minor features and usability improvements, as well as over a hundred minor bug fixes.

Tony Lucas, Founder of Flexiant, explains: “This release is the first of many incremental enhancements to our FlexiScale products. We know our customers will in particular appreciate the far wider range of RAM and CPU configurations and the metadata service will open up a wide range of new possibilities for image providers and those using our platform for automatic virtual server instantiation.”

www.flexiant.com

This year’s SME Accounting Category was billed by Accounting Web as a fight between the ‘leading lights of the accounting software as a service industry’ with FreeAgent being a key player in the small business and freelance market.

Ed Molyneux, FreeAgent Central CEO comments: “This is an amazing result for us and we are delighted to be recognised by our customers and SIFT for a second year. Our aim is to democratise accounting, and this just shows that our customers and our peers in the industry are behind us all the way!”

The Software Satisfaction Awards shortlist was drawn up by customers voting for their favourite company. Voters were asked to consider ease of use; functionality; reliability; and value for money when rating the business software.

An influential panel of judges drawn from the accounting industry then assessed the shortlist, scoring entrants on levels of customer service and satisfaction, both over the past 12 months and the future.

This year’s winners were decided by a combination of user voted (50%) and judged (50%) elements.

FreeAgent online software is easy to use and gives a clear picture of profit and loss, making running a business easier and putting the small business owner in control of their finances. Hosted on the cloud, FreeAgent is accessible around the clock, from any computer, which is ideal for the way many small business owners and freelancers work.

As freelancers themselves, the three founders of FreeAgent Central needed a finance tool that would give them a clear picture of their business accounts. That product did not exist and so FreeAgent was born.

The software has a clean and simple design, highly intuitive and usable. It prepares VAT returns, calculates self assessed income tax and corporation tax and manages PAYE and NI. Users can monitor profit and loss, send and track invoices, track time and expenses, manage projects and payments.

The software was recently updated to allow customers to file their VAT returns electronically within the system directly to HMRC, saving many hours of paperwork.

FreeAgent also encourages collaboration between accountant and client by allowing accountants to login to the system, so they can offer the most up-to-date advice. Accountants can easily export trial balance data to generate end-of-year accounts.

An active online community of FreeAgent customers has grown up where users openly discuss ideas, questions and problems about accounts. Additionally there is a live advice helpline where users can ‘Ask an Expert’ about financial issues they may be having.

FreeAgent is subscription based with costs starting at £15 per month for a sole trader, £20 for a partnership and £25 for a limited company.

www.freeagentcentral.com

This funding provides Flexiant with additional working capital to further develop Extility, its revolutionary cloud computing technology, and its infrastructure-as-a-service offering, FlexiScale.

Flexiant’s Extility software is a licensed virtualised cloud platform delivering all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Licensees of Extility not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business; the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they are able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years.

Flexiant will also continue to market its FlexiScale public cloud service which has been running for nearly three years. FlexiScale’s leading-edge technology enables start-ups and SMEs to grow from one server to one thousand servers in seconds – critical for organisations offering streaming video, social networking or SaaS, and ideal for a wealth of other applications.

FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual dedicated servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure required from customers, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

The funding round was backed by over twenty angel investors, as well as the management team.

Alex Bligh, Chief Executive Officer of Flexiant, said: “This investment will enable Flexiant to develop further our technology and to drive our sales process. At a time when the demand for this kind of technology far exceeds the availability of proven models such as Extility and FlexiScale, Flexiant is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this market place.”

http://www.flexiant.com