Cloud Cruiser Introduces Analytics Functionality With 4.0 Release

Most enterprises these days operate in hybrid cloud environments in which multiple workloads are sometimes hosted across a number of public and private cloud platforms, as well as legacy IT infrastructure. Managing costs in those complex environments can be tricky and optimizing cloud spend downright perplexing.

"As an industry we got the movement of workloads figured out and the security figured out and now it's all about the economics," Dave Zabrowski, CEO of Silicon Valley-based software developer Cloud Cruiser, told CRN.

Cloud Cruiser aims to impart financial control on these unruly hybrid environments and save enterprise customers and solution providers money by better coordinating cloud usage with cloud resources provisioned and paid for.

[ Related: Cloud Cruiser: We Guarantee 10 Percent Cloud Savings]

The company on Wednesday made generally available the latest version of its cost-management software.

Cloud Cruiser 4.0, which introduces an analytics framework called Insights, helps businesses gain visibility on their current consumption, forecast future usage and compare costs across platforms to achieve and maintain balance between IT demand and supply.

"The market is going through a transformation where they're running IT as a business more and more. [Solution providers] are acquiring services from any number of sources that they are providing customers, as well as brokering public clouds and creating private clouds," Zabrowski told CRN

"In doing so, they have to employ consumption-based models, which means bringing commerce into those decisions," he added.

Insights runs in concert with Foundations, Cloud Cruiser's data-collection software that tracks real-time usage across the enterprise, maps business processes and applies specific rates and prices.

Together, Insights and Foundations assess "three different coordinates" to manage costs, Zabrowski told CRN.

The first involves actually tracking usage at a granular level to figure out all the services, including shadow IT, the business is running and what its consumption patterns are.

The second involves analyzing that data to report, forecast and model future usage.

Finally, it comes down to money: pricing, budgeting and charge-back.

Cloud Cruiser 4.0 introduces a customizable executive dashboard to demonstrate those high-level insights into costs, overages, capacity limits, price elasticity, rate fluctuations and other factors that ultimately determine if a cloud consumer is really getting the best deal possible.

Users can immediately see if they have over-provisioned or under-allocated services, and the modeling capabilities allow them to consider alternate "what if" scenarios that may allow for the provisioning of resources at lower costs.

"We take trending data and apply it into the future. We can do forecasting to spot opportunities in advance in order to lower your total cost of delivery," Zabrowski said.

Cloud Cruiser's customers typically realize five to 10 percent savings in their IT budgets after adopting the technology, according to Zabrowski.

PUBLISHED OCT. 15, 2014