Flexiant’s Cloud Orchestrator suite is aimed at service providers, mostly telcos, who want to become infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) wholesalers with minimal effort. The company’s biggest rivals are probably VMware and Citrix, although OnApp and Joyent also play in the same space to varying degrees.

The funding is the largest tranche Flexiant has received thus far, taking its total funding to date to around £6 million. The cash comes from London-based private investors, rather than venture capital. “We have a strong local investor base,” CEO George Knox told me. “They’re investing in exposure to the cloud market – this is part of their balanced portfolio.”

U.S. service providers in particular can now expect to have Flexiant knocking on their doors, Knox explained:

“The money will allow us to continue to be innovative on the development process. We’re very focused… we don’t try and compete in the private cloud, on-premise space. This allows us to concentrate on the service provider space and in particular to put more focus into the U.S. service provider space. At the moment we’re still relatively unknown there. Even in the European market it’s only in the last 6-9 months that we’ve become known.”

Interestingly, Knox claimed that OpenStack isn’t a particularly serious rival due to the needs of the Flexiant’s target market.

“The service provider market doesn’t want to spend time, energy and money putting a whole lot of consultants to work,” he said. “We do get some organizations that are open source zealots but [the drivers of that] are in the IT department. As soon as you talk to the business people, [who are concerned with] how you get to market quickly and how do you monetize – they don’t want to go down the 9-12 month route.”

Last month Flexiant also announced a partnership with France’s USharesoft. USharesoft has a “cloud software factory” product called UForge, which lets service providers automatically create and maintain full software stacks – applications included — as cloud server templates. These templates can now be published straight to the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator image library, ready for self-provisioning.

Flexiant says it picked up 14 customers in the first quarter of this year alone (and has recently been touting the Canadian service provider Cartika as a case-study customer).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough
• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Work media tools in 2012 and beyond
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

The news was posted to a blog by EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis late Tuesday. Hollis wrote that OpenStack, like Linux before it, has “matured in to a serious enterprise operating environment” and “the OpenStack Foundation is the key industry nexus point for the evolution of a growing number of different-flavored distributions and editions.”

NASA and Rackspace launched OpenStack about three years ago to be an alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware. Since then, it has gained a ton of vendor support with Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, IBM and Red Hat all joining up. Citrix was a big proponent but last April started pushing CloudStack as an Apache-backed OpenStack alternative. In fact, it’s almost easier to count the IT giants who are not in the OpenStack fold — that would be Microsoft, Amazon and –until yesterday — EMC.

As Hollis noted:

“Over time, we believe that OpenStack-based distributions will be considered by more IT organizations — just like Linux before it. The per-customer specifics will vary widely based on all sorts of factors, but it’s hard to argue the macro trend.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map

The bring-your-own-device wave that’s sweeping businesses, constitutes a huge quandary for those companies. They want their employees to be able to use their iPhone, Android phone or tablet of choice but they don’t want to give those devices willy nilly access to corporate assets. Cue companies like Zenprise, which swaddles smart phones and tablets with an extra layer of security that spots unusual usage patterns that could signal big problems.

According to the company press release,  Citrix will integrate Zenprise’s software with its own Citrix CloudGateway and Me@Work products for managing mobile apps and data.  The acquisition, terms of which were not announced, should be completed in the first quarter of 2013. The move is not surprising in that Citrix launched a big enterprise mobility push at its Synergy conference last spring.

Zenprise customers include the Boston Red Sox, Grant Thornton, and Monsanto. Zenprise’s products can perform up-front checks of the device in question and will block device access to corporate resources if it is “unmanaged,” jailbroken or out of compliance with the company’s blacklist or whitelist policy, according to Zenprise’s website.

BYOD is a huge problem for enterprise accounts — most of which are contending either with the fear of data breaches or breaches themselves. Even tech powers like IBM have dealt with the challenges of BYOD by actually neutering some popular features of user devices — Siri is muted for example.

Founded in 2003, Zenprise got funding from Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, the Mayfield Fund, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Bay Partners.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• The promise of software-defined networking
• New challenges for the IT organization

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• IT spending update, third quarter 2012
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Citrix kicked up a ruckus six months ago when it — an OpenStack participant — offered up CloudStack to the Apache Foundation as an alternative open-source cloud.  Citrix had acquired CloudStack via its purchase of Cloud.com a year earlier.  Now, at Citrix Synergy Barcelona it’s continuing that push.

From the Citrix blog announcing the news, Cisco and Citrix are now partnering to build “integrated cloud orchestration” based on Citrix CloudPlatform – which is Citrix’ commercial CloudStack implementation. The resulting software will tie CloudPlatform into Cisco’s Nexus switches, Open Network Environment (ONE) and Unified Computing System (UCS) converged hardware.  And, CA’s Cloud Automation Suite and Nimsoft Monitor will support CloudStack.

In cloud, does maturity matter?

CloudStack is more mature than OpenStack and got early traction among service providers. Citrix says that 500 CloudStack-based clouds come online each month.

OpenStack, which is entering its third year,  has just transitioned from a Rackspace-led effort to a more multi-vendor-focused foundation.  The cloud battle is not completely black and white although proponents in both camps often make it seem so. Cisco, for example, is now in both camps — Cisco CTO Lew Tucker is vice chairman of the OpenStack Foundation.

“There isn’t as big of a rift as many make out,” Peder Ulander, VP of product marketing at Citrix told me via email.

 ”We [Citrix] are are still actively committed to making XenServer the best virtualization platform for OpenStack as well as doing a number of NetScaler integrations.  There has also been a lot of good work in the CloudStack community to bridge some of the efforts (ie. Cisco, Nicira and Shuberg Phillis working on Quantum integrations, CloudOps and the Citrix guys driving Swift integration and [Alcatel-Lucent's] cloudband solution delivering an OpenStack API support module for CloudStack).”

Citrix’s contributions to OpenStack are listed here.

Update: With cloud computing adoption still in its early days, it will be interesting to see how these open-source efforts fare —  OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus –two other options — are all vying for customers and hoping to gain traction even as Amazon Web Services — the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing — continues to forge ahead.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user mrs.tom

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

While not disclosing the amount of the investment, Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne said it’s an important vote of confidence given that Citrix is the company behind both Xen, the virtualization foundation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CloudStack, an open-source platform that powers private clouds.

Hey guys: Cheap cloud could be cheaper

Byrne said utilization of public cloud resources is not optimal so while the perception is that Amazon EC2 is cheap, it could be cheaper still if people really made sure they’re really using up what they pay for.

Many companies buy, say, reserved Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS US East region, but then their developers launch new instances in Oregon because they’re cheaper, Byrne said. That’s the problem Cloud Vertical and other companies like Newvem and Cloudyn are attacking.

Vendor-backed accelerators on the rise

Citrix is not the only tech vendor in the startup acceleration biz — SAP is doing something similar in Silicon Valley — but SAP’s program focuses specifically on building out the Hana ecosystem, while Citrix looks for interesting startups in the broader infrastructure and cloud services arena. The goal is to help these fledgling companies bridge early seed investments and A Series funding, said Jeremiah Shackleford, who heads up marketing for the Citrix accelerator. It has funded about a dozen startups, most recently, Cumulogic, a Platform-as-a-Service provider.

“We put in a small — maybe $250,000 — investment and also offer the companies office space in Silicon Valley and help with customer development,” Shackleford told me in an interview.

Reed Sturtevant, managing director of Project 11, a Cambridge, MA-based seed investor and a director of TechStars Boston, said the accelerator model is growing because of the changing economics of startups.

“The programmatic approach of an accelerator model is a response to the question of how do you scale investment and mentorship across many companies as the dollar amount needed to validate each new business continues to drop.  You can often do with $25,000 today what used to take $500,000 ten years ago, so let’s say you want to apply $1 million to support external innovation, it takes a very different approach to spread that across 20 companies vs. across two,” Sturtevant aid via email.

Come hear more about the deployment and provisioning of public cloud resources from Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels and others at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe in Amsterdam later this month.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Near-term strategies for IT managers
• A near-term outlook for big data
• The new IT manager, part 1

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro