Automate, Accelerate & Scale IT for business: ActiveEon

ActiveEon is an Open Source ISV offering automation and scalability solutions for IT, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) with jobs distribution and parallelization allowing acceleration of business processes and reduction of infrastructure costs. ActiveEon clientele includes L'Oréal, SeaEngineering, JoyGlobal, Home Office, Legal & General, CEA, Amadeus, INRA, Mediametrie, TAGSYS, La Française Asset Management, CNES and many more.

ActiveEon: Scale beyond Limits

The company was set up as a spin-off of INRIA, French Institute of Computer Science. Denis Caromel founded ActiveEon in 2007, with his OASIS project team of 45 R&D engineers from the INRIA around ProActive, open source software based on distributed and parallel computing technology for IT scheduling and big compute. ActiveEon was then established thanks to technological transfer from INRIA to build software and make it available for industry. The first customers were from different verticals: energy, industry, finance, scientific organizations. With its job scheduling solution, ActiveEon addressed then what we call now “DevOps”, offering a complete tool not only for application scheduling, but also for datacenter and infrastructure management (Machine Learning Log Analysis).

ActiveEon was created by a team of scientists, researchers in parallel and distributed computing, and thus has a strong R&D background in high-performance computing. R&D is at the core of product development at ActiveEon, and the team is mainly composed of highly-qualified R&D engineers and experienced developers who shape the product in agile and customer-oriented mode. The company constantly grew over the years of existence and thanks to fund raising, offering interesting positions to engineers from different countries, involving diverse technologies and skills.

Prime Product: An Open Source, Innovative, And Flexible Solution

The first product launched by ActiveEon was “ProActive Workflows & Scheduling” part of “ProActive Parallel Suite” – a middleware suite that now combined a java job scheduler for distributed and parallel executions, a workflow engine to create dependencies between tasks using different computing languages, and a resource manager, to execute these workflows of tasks on specific resources of the grid or datacenter on premises.

The product was shaped and further developed in order to meet existing and potential customers’ needs, going from high-performance distributed computing to user-friendly GUI, from grid to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management. The market was very attracted to the product as it offered many innovations and the product was a success. It is in constant development, taking into account market evolution and customers’ requirements including Big Data processing and orchestration, multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures, etc.

One of the main challenges faced by the company was to convince customers that they need a tool to optimize their IT and reduce infrastructure costs, and ActiveEon’s tool is able to optimize their IT treatments and resource utilization on both application and infrastructure levels. In order to prove that, ActiveEon did benchmarks to demonstrate how high the performance could be with them thanks to resource consumption optimizations and parallel execution. Now with the Cloud migration, customer see the bill at the end of each month, and they do understand it right away! 

Customers’ Stellar Testimonies

“The usage of ProActive allowed us to have a trivialized approach to our processing infrastructure which includes Linux and Windows computers and GPU. This product helped us reduce operational costs by 10. Thanks to ProActive, we are thinking of processing about 500 annual Terabytes in 2 years, which will allow us to be a key player in Europe for metagenomics samples.”

- Nicolas Pons, Head of InfoBioStat Platform, MetaGenoPolis

“After contacting ActiveEon, we quickly learned that their skills and expertise were exactly what we needed. Their commitment and dedication to the job is exceptional, and despite being thousands of miles away, were able to quickly get us up and running with parallel computing using their easy-to-learn Java-based control and management software. We are now running large oceanographic simulations in a quarter of the time on our distributed network.” - Christopher Goody, SeaEngineering, USA

“Now, thanks to ProActive and additional optimizations, the batch time which previously was taking us 18 hours, is now down to 5 hours, and by the end of the year, my hope and expectation is to go definitely below 4 hours and possibly less by having more grid hosts and more capacity.”- Guido Imperiale, Lead Integration Engineer, Legal & General

Admire the Visionary

Dr. Denis Caromel, Founder and CEO:  Dr. Caromel has been working for more than 20 years as a researcher in parallel, concurrent and distributed programming, cloud computing, workload automation, applications and infrastructure automation for Inria and University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. He holds a PhD degree in computer science in distributed and parallel computing and an MBA from HEC Business School. Dr. Caromel acted as keynote speaker at several major conferences (MDM, DAPSYS, CGW, Shanghai CCGrid 2009, IEEE ICCP’09, ICPADS 2009 in Hong Kong, Devoxx in Paris, Open Stack Summit in Santa Clara), and was invited as a conference speaker on Clouds at Expo Universal in Shanghai.

Dr. Caromel is an entrepreneur, and he has worked 2 years in the United States for a startup company in California. Since 2011, he is ActiveEon’s CEO and currently manages an international company of about 60 people located in France, UK, Africa, Bulgaria, and United States.  Dr. Caromel’s vision and strategy is to reinforce ActiveEon’s position as a major player of digital transformation and automation in the cloud. ActiveEon team works in agile mode, and Dr. Caromel prefers his team to work in holacracy.

"Our R&D team is very passionate about technology, and each member is expert in several areas, which helps our offer be very complete and solve diverse business needs for our customers, involving integration of different technologies."