Cloud Cruiser Delivers Templates For Assessing Economics Of 'Big 5' Clouds

Cloud Cruiser introduced workflow templates on Monday to help companies track in greater, more-granular detail how efficiently they're spending on public and private cloud resources.

Deirdre Mahon, chief marketing officer at Cloud Cruiser, told CRN the new package, CloudSmart-Now, works across the "Big 5" clouds: AWS, Microsoft Azure, the Windows Azure Pack private cloud, OpenStack and VMware.

"As enterprises move workloads to the cloud, we're all about helping them track and manage the usage by the users, and the economics and costs related to that," Mahon told CRN.

[Related: Cloud Cruiser Introduces Analytics Functionality With 4.0 Release]

San Jose, Calif.-based Cloud Cruiser was founded six years ago to develop software helping businesses gain visibility of their cloud consumption, forecast future usage and compare costs across platforms to achieve and maintain balance between IT demand and supply.

The packaged set of preconfigured workbooks, templates and analytic tools gives IT pros deeper visibility into their organizations' cloud deployments, with usage and cost data that helps them in less time make more-informed decisions about provisioning resources either from public providers or on-premise, she said.

Often, the costs -- and cost benefits -- of cloud migrations can be deceptive, Mahon told CRN.

"When organizations become more aggressive about moving IT budgets to cloud environments, they think it can be a lot cheaper than their current data center. But before you know it, it can spiral out of control," Mahon said.

CloudSmart-Now lends clarity for those dabbling with the cloud solutions it was designed to work with. Those "Big 5" clouds are the ones that most often come up in conversations with customers, most of which are using some combination of the five, she said.

"It puts the knowledge in the hands of those who have to report to the CFO, giving them full visibility into how much is being used," Mahon said.

Cloud Cruiser has plans to roll out templates that integrate with more clouds in the future, including those that track and evaluate Software-as-a-Service usage, Mahon told CRN.

While it's too early to talk to partners about the templates, Mahon told CRN, Cloud Cruiser is rooted in a channel approach and CloudSmart-Now is intended to drive and facilitate business for solution providers, she said.

Resellers can use the out-of-the-box templates to track their customers' usage, allowing them to help assess an organization's spend and appropriately modify their rates to control margins, she said.

"You're researching exactly what they're using and so you can prevent a bill for them that's sliced and diced," Mahon told CRN. "You get the bill to the customer, and the bill is in meaningful business terms that they understand."

PUBLISHED AUG. 31, 2015