Abiquo Monday materialized Abiquo 2.0, its first major cloud-making release in 18 months.

CEO Peter Malcolm says the company took its time and believes it's succeeded in addressing the needs of the cloud's three distinct stakeholders: the cloud consumer, who's usually attracted to Amazon; the CFO and compliance guys who want to know who has what where and how much it costs; and IT operations, which is afraid of AWS, knowing Amazon can be as dangerous as juggling knives unless you know what you're doing.


Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan interviews Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm

In fact, he says, there are companies where using Amazon is a firing offense.

Abiquo 2.0 is intended to meet the self-service provisioning requirements of the application and development teams; the control and visibility needs of IT operations; and the governance, data center efficiency and cost-reduction objectives of the compliance weenies and the CFO while at the same time mitigating data security risks.

It deepens the cloudware's capabilities in management, automation, self-service and governance. It also extends its functionality to include unlimited multi-currency pricing models for chargeback, show-back and show-forward, a new customizable portal to enable "fast-track" provisioning services and enhanced orchestration and automation features like full integration with Opscode Chef, which lets accredited users individually customize VMs at deployment from within the Abiquo GUI.

This offers even the most complex enterprises greater opex savings through streamlined automation. By combining Abiquo's infrastructure automation with a "write once, deploy many" Chef recipe users cut the time and effort needed to set up new environments.

Abiquo 2.0 is also integrated with the Jaspersoft open source business intelligence platform. A range of sample reports, rebranded "skin" and Abiquo's authentication plug-in are all provided in open source form, allowing customers to extend or customize reporting to meet their own requirements.

Malcolm thinks the widgetry will lower enterprise resistance to the cloud.

He's particularly pleased with the thing's unique Show Forward feature, which projects the cost of a deployment before it's deployed and should help users break their old school habits of asking for more than they need.

Abiquo customers can rapidly build and manage fully automated and governed, self-service, multi-stack, multi-hypervisor, private, public or hybrid clouds from globally deployed resources. Abiquo's GUI is now available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

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