I caught up last week with John Pocock, chairman of Edinburgh-based 'cloud orchestration' software firm Flexiant. Mature readers may also recall that Pocock was CEO of consultancy Druid which was acquired by FI Group (later Xansa, and subsequently acquired by Steria) at the height of the dotcom boom. (And purely for nostalgia value, it turns out that we both cut our career teeth at IBM as systems engineers!).
Pocock told me that Flexiant had just secured a further £3.75m of funding from its 'angel' network, facilitated through London-based corporate finance firm Leopard Rock Capital. Flexiant – born of web hosting company Xcalibre Communctions (now Webfusion) – raised an initial £1m mainly from angel investors in March 2010, just prior to the launch of its flagship Extility product (since rebranded Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator). Flexiant raised a further £1m of angel funding in January 2012, appointing Pocock as chairman, and entrepreneur George Knox as CEO (see IndustryViews Venture Capital Q1 2012).
Flexiant plays in a lively market with no shortage of competitors. Its claimed USP is that it has both the 'orchestration' bit (automated provision of 'cloud' infrastructure services) and a billing engine, a crucial component for suppliers of IaaS (infrastructure as a service) that Flexiant primarily serves.
In keeping with the 'cloud' business model (the products themselves run 'on-premise') Flexiant charges on a 'pay-for-use' basis mainly geared to the number of processor cores under management. With a free trial download (common in the sector) and entry-level pricing at $8 per core coupled with a $150 annual licence fee, Flexiant will need to manage a fair number of cores in order to take a meaningful slice of a global 'cloud' market opportunity that Pocock estimates at $30bn!