Abiquo Gives CIOs More Control Over Cloud Computing

Abiquo, which bills itself as an enterprise cloud management software company, has released version 1.7 of its flagship software for a company to set IT business policy and apply that policy to physical or virtual data centers and even to third party hosting providers. Abiquo 1.7 overcomes some of the major impediments to wider adoption of cloud computing, which is the inability of a company to decide what IT resources are available to them, said Peter Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo.

"Today that decision is made almost exclusively by humans, and that is the barrier to cloud adoption," Malcolm said.

By that, he means that today, IT staff in an organization or a hosting provider allocate IT resources to run certain applications and they have conflicting goals. For instance, an application team may want to distribute an application over multiple servers to maximize performance and reliability. But a hosting provider will want to load as many applications as possible onto one server before booting up another. The fewer servers they have to operate, the lower their overhead and the higher their margins.

Instead, with Abiquo, the customer sets its own business policies, perhaps at the chief information officer (CIO) level, and physical or virtual servers are configured accordingly no matter where they are, said Malcolm.

"You set the business policies that you want applied in your organization using our definition tools and we make sure that those policies are consistently applied automatically every time one of those users out there provisions a machine," he said.Besides capacity utilization, version 1.7 of the software also sets business policies related to security, compliance, governance and other concerns. Because Abiquo is an open source software company, it offers a free community edition of the business policies software and a commercial enterprise edition, subscription pricing for which begins at around $1,000 per physical server per year, Malcolm said. The new product should be available in about 30 days.

According to a study commissioned by Abiquo and conducted by Forrester Consulting, while automation of cloud environments -- that is, being able to set business policies -- is a key enabler of cloud computing, companies surveyed found varying degrees of automation maturity in the market. Specifically, while 93 percent of organizations surveyed were interested in one or more types of automation, 28 percent had only basic automation options available to them.

Because of limited automation, companies had a harder time attaining the business flexibility and cost savings needed to make cloud computing worthwhile, the study stated.

"As cloud computing is more a business model than a technology, true cloud deployments will need to focus more directly on business needs," said Forrester.

The survey was conducted of 60 organizations adopting cloud computing in the U.S. and U.K.