Abiquo is a Finalist for the 2013 Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award

Abiquo has announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the European business region.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. The nominees are evaluated on 20 main quantitative and qualitative criterion: they include disruptive impact, market footprint, proof of concept, financial performance, technology innovation, social value, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

“This year was rewarding, beyond all expectations” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Abiquo shows great promise and therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring Europe. We know that the 2013 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact.”

Finalists for the 2013 edition of the Red Herring 100 Europe award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the telecommunications, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, mobile and other industries completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Europe Forum in Amsterdam, April 8-10, 2013. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of April 10 at the event.

Developing tools with Abiquo API: Event notifier

One of the KEY points of Abiquo is that you can use its API to access ALL resources and actions available from the graphical user interface. This enables us to create an infinite number of external applications that you can integrate with your environment or platform. All the API resources are documented on our wiki.

In this article, we are going to present the Abiquo Events Notifier, a Python tool that monitors events performed in Abiquo and based on a configurable list of rules, sends notifications by email to the cloud administrators, enterprise administrators, etc. This tool can be very useful for the cloud administrator in tracking errors on the platform. Also, you can configure the tool to notify your users when a deploy is finished or if a virtual appliance they own has been undeployed. You can find the full documentation on Abiquo DevOps wiki

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Controlling your Cloud Management Platform: Abiquo and EM360 Podcast

As advocates for flexible, non-vendor lock-in, Abiquo’s VP of Products Lee Fisher speaks to the Enterprise 360 team about the best way to optimise Cloud Management Platforms and other considerations within the cloud industry.

The discussion talks about the key challenges that enterprises face when adopting virtualisation and Cloud related technologies.  The podcast highlights the fact that although the technologies are different, the legacy processes, security, workflows and approvals and governance requirements remain the same and most enterprises struggle with adapting those processes accordingly.

Click here to listen and leave your views below!

Enterprise Management Associates puts Abiquo on the radar

Abiquo has been rated by analyst house, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) as value leader in the industry for cloud platforms.  EMA is a leading industry analyst and consulting firm that specialises in providing deep insight in data management technologies. Abiquo was credited in the top tier category of ‘value leader’ along with Cisco, due to the platform “offering all the ingredients for customers to create a true enterprise cloud”.  The cloud platform was taken and analysed against the following set criteria to determine the strength of the cloud platform: functionality, architecture and integration, deployment and administration.

Abiquo’s platform was commended for having the ability to tie together “a companies’ existing technologies coherently and securely, leveraging existing infrastructures instead of introducing a new technology that sits uncomfortably in the middle of the datacentre”.  EMA was also impressed by Abiquo’s unique ability to move a business’ environment from one hypervisor to another at the push of a button.

In terms of functionality, the platform allows for the provision of both physical and virtual cloud resources through a simple interface in a straightforward and concise manner. Being able to be easily integrated into existing infrastructures allows fast deployment of the software with 3-4 weeks being the average turnaround time. This was seen by EMA to be highly reasonable, especially since the platform carries multiple features and capabilities.

Abiquo was praised on the open architecture of the platform with extension for open flow which is easy to create around the platform.

Torsten Volk, Senior Analyst, EMA states “Abiquo’s value proposition cuts through the usual marketing hype, offering customers what they actually need: a cloud platform that ties together existing enterprise technologies. We applaud the revolutionary approach Abiquo has taken to help businesses transform their existing cloud infrastructure. Users are able to integrate all existing technologies and manage them from one simple self-service interface. We’re particularly impressed with Abiquo’s unique capability of moving environments from one hypervisor to another by the push of a button. It truly is a value leader in the industry”.

Customers who already have the solution in place spoke of the great support and responsiveness they receive from Abiquo from the start of implementation to after care services. They also liked the simple functionality of the interfaces which both admin and end users found they could use with ease.

The results are in: Abiquo’s Cloud Survey

Abiquo survey reveals alarming statistics on lack of cloud strategy and integration.

84% of IT managers are yet to make the most of cloud technology, according to research by cloud software provider Abiquo. The survey highlights an alarming trend of IT managers failing to effectively adopt cloud services to improve business efficiency.

The survey carried out at Cloud Expo Europe reveals that 60% of IT managers feel their business’s IT strategy isn’t under control or providing what is needed. 57% of them said they have no defined cloud strategy to follow at all.

78% of businesses questioned do not manage their cloud technology from a single interface (instead using a convoluted cloud setup) and almost two-thirds said they aren’t automating the allocation of networking resources to efficiently fulfil cloud services. It was therefore unsurprising that 47% of businesses are making technology and cloud decisions without getting the IT department involved.

Jim Darragh, CEO, Abiquo said: “We’ve been talking to lots of businesses about difficulties in effectively adopting cloud and time and time again the same issues are coming up: it’s not self-service, there’s no single interface for technology, the components aren’t working together. The bigger players in the cloud market aren’t solving these problems yet they control the market share. This is causing frustration in the industry and confusing IT managers.”

Abiquo recently launched EverythinQ, which is the integration of its software with the third-party infrastructure-based components businesses are currently using for cloud operation and management. This enables businesses to manage everything from a unified platform.