FlexiSphere Expands Senior Management

DeSantis has been responsible for the day-to-day running of the vendor since his hire in February, according to Tom Saleh, CEO of FlexiSphere.

Prior to joining FlexiSphere, DeSantis was most recently the CFO of Plainfield Asset Management, a multi-strategy hedge fund. He also was president of the Financial Accounting Standards Board's (FASB's) parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), during its development and adoption of the XBRL messaging standard for financial reporting.

As president and CEO, DeSantis joins the small staff that includes Saleh; Ken Byrne, co-founder and global head of sales; Topher Wurts, chief marketing officer (CMO); Rich Schapp, responsible for technical operations; and Susan Grommes, who looks after project management and interfaces with clients.

Saleh acknowledges that the vendor has a small staff, but it leverages its relationship with datacenter provider Exand and cloud infrastructure provider Appistry, which are also equity partners in FlexiSphere. "We get substantiation technical and post-sale services from Appistry," says Saleh.

Building the VPC

According to FlexiSphere officials, the financial services industry is just seeing the virtualization concept emerge in the Intel- and AMD-based computing environments.

Part of the challenge in adopting cloud computing in the industry is meeting all security and compliance regulations in the new computing environment, says Saleh. "If a cloud isn't aware of its physical location or the security of the components that are used by the cloud, it is quite easy for things to leak into places where they don't belong or be exposed to people to whom they shouldn't be exposed," he says. "We make sure that everything conforms with the client's compliance and regulatory needs. We can even expose the unknown portion of the security layer to the clients so they know what they don't know and take steps to address those issues," he adds.

To provide this capability, FlexiSphere enables the provisioning of virtual private clouds (VPCs) that have the cost and flexibility of a public cloud as well as security and the ability to federate between one another, explains Wurts.

FlexiSphere's compute cloud environment is currently in production and the vendor is spending most of its time provisioning lab or test spaces where new clients can bring their applications and manage them using FlexiSphere's financial services stack.

"A lot of firms and vendors in our industry are just getting a handle on what cloud computing is, what it means for them in a testing environment, and what is required for the industry," says Wurst. "These labs, which are the first engagements that we have, are predominately used in test and developmental environments."

The vendor manages its VPCs using policy engines developed using open-source technology. "The technology is open-source, but the specific implementation is unique," says Saleh.

"With these policy engines, we are creating virtual private areas for customers and then we manage connections, or federation, between them very tightly and in near-real time," adds Wurts.

Through this managed federation, FlexiSphere is able to export work out to other cloud environments, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Verizon's Computing as a Service (CaaS).

"Applications and other vendors operating on those other clouds can be brought into the federated model," says Saleh. "The policy layer that manages all the federation is aware of those situations."

Rob Daly