Abiquo, the leading Enterprise Cloud software company, today announced a major series of ecosystem partnerships designed to make enterprise datacenters even more efficient, responsive and cost-effective. The partnerships improve many key aspects of the datacenter including physical and virtual infrastructure management, automated resource configuration, simplified deployment of image libraries, and new capabilities for billing and reporting, among other benefits. Abiquo’s new ecosystem expands the company’s reach beyond its already robust automation, management, self-service and governance of enterprise clouds.

“Today’s enterprises are looking for a complete, yet flexible solution to deliver on the promise of enterprise clouds,” said Trevor Chamberlain, vice president of business development for Abiquo. “By partnering with innovative and industry-leading technologies, we can provide a solution that delivers even greater value for all enterprise cloud stakeholders.”

Simplified Orchestration and Automation

Abiquo’s existing automation and orchestration capabilities are expanded through its partnership with Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Built specifically for automating and managing cloud infrastructure, Opscode Chef allows IT teams to write “recipes” that automatically configure and deploy servers and applications according to pre-determined rules. Enterprises can leverage the value of the open source community through publicly available recipes, or write their own automation rules once and use them across many deployments.

“The Abiquo and Opscode partnership makes sense for enterprises,” said Christopher Brown, CTO of Opscode. “By combining our capabilities to orchestrate infrastructure with Abiquo’s leading enterprise cloud solution, we deliver the automation that makes a significant impact to efficiency and cost savings.”

Physical and Virtual Infrastructure Management

Extension of physical infrastructure support is achieved through greater integration with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and NetApp storage systems. Via its API level integration to Cisco UCS, Abiquo will simplify provisioning of new or replacement of failed blade servers by leveraging service profiles and templates. Additionally, Abiquo’s self-service allocation of storage resources has been extended to support NetApp Multistore enabled storage systems.

Finally, Abiquo supports the broadest set of hypervisors on the market today and has enhanced its commercial hypervisor portfolio by announcing support for the newest versions of VMware vSphere 5 and Citrix XenServer 6.0.

Cost Management

To assist in datacenter cost optimization, Abiquo now offers predictive cost analytics, Business Intelligence (BI) and cost planning though Cloud Cruiser, a leader in cloud cost management solutions. Cloud Cruiser’s end-to-end visibility, powerful BI analytics, budgeting, alerting, consumption forecasting and hierarchical chargeback capabilities allow companies to maximize their cost savings in private, public and hybrid clouds.

“Cloud Cruiser complements Abiquo by offering ‘day one’ cost transparency, accountability, empowerment and control to achieve the cost savings expected in the cloud,” said Dave Zabrowski, Founder and CEO of Cloud Cruiser.

Billing Visibility

As customers consume cloud resources and enable just in time provisioning, highlighting the cost of services has become paramount. Abiquo has responded by working with leading billing and payment vendors to build integrations. By partnering with ecosystem vendors like Zuora, a provider of billing solutions for subscription based e-commerce services; Aria, provider of enterprise grade cloud billing and recurring revenue management platform for mid-market and Global 2000 companies; and Ubersmith, which specializes in management and chargeback for ISP/MSPs, web hosting providers, cloud providers and colocation services, Abiquo is able to deliver best of breed experiences to its customers.

“By expanding the solution to offer visibility and control around billing, charge-back and show-back, customers can deliver service catalogs or resources with cost information integrated. Research shows that visibility to cost structures is critical to the success of private cloud adoption,” said Matthew Toback, CEO of Ubersmith. “By delivering our solution with Abiquo, customers are able to see cost information and consume resources all from a single interface.”

Automated Software Delivery

By partnering with UShareSoft, Abiquo lets datacenter administrators easily build and maintain complete software stacks on any operating system for any physical, virtual and cloud environment. UShareSoft's UForge automates the creation and maintenance of cloud server templates and virtual machines (VMs) that can be automatically published to Abiquo's enterprise cloud.

“By combining Abiquo’s automation of infrastructure with UShareSoft's self-service platform for creating, maintaining and governing server templates, we truly empower cloud consumers to build and share services in a new and efficient way,” said Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft.

Reporting and Management

Through its relationship with Jaspersoft, datacenter management is further enhanced through the ability to create advanced ad hoc reports on virtually all performance and financial metrics. Jaspersoft features a drag-and-drop report designer, accessible via standard browser or iPad, that enables users to model, manipulate and visualize data using OLAP or in-memory analysis to quickly identify issues, spot trends and make better business decisions.

For more information about Abiquo and its enterprise cloud management solutions, please visit www.abiquo.com.