Turbonomic 5.9 Goes Deep On AWS, Azure, Takes Aim At VMware's vRealize Platform

With its latest release, Turbonomic has fired a shot across the bow of VMware's vRealize cloud management platform, by introducing public cloud migration planning, budgeting and cost forecasting for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Turbonomic says the introduction of Turbonomic 5.9 makes it the only single software platform to allow workload monitoring and automation across on-premises and public cloud environments in real time.

Rene van den Bedem, chief architect and strategist at RoundTower Technologies, a Cincinnati, Ohio, solution provider that works with Turbonomic, said Turbonomic's latest release and its enthusiastic embrace of the channel puts it on direct competitive footing with VMware's vRealize platform.

Related: VMware To Boost vRealize Lineup With Acquisition Of Real-Time Data Analysis Startup Wavefront

"The ability to use 5.9 in your pricing planning in multi-cloud environments is direct competition to VMware's vRealize suite for financial planning," van den Bedem said. "A lot of customers with AWS have problems doing financial planning. This mitigates that risk. Takes it away. Turbonomic has pivoted their sales model. They've moved to a channel model. They're using our sales reps now to position strategic deals, and it makes a big difference in terms of targeting strategic accounts. They're getting C-level communications. VMware has had a bit of a myopic strategy in the last couple of years. Turbonomic is vendor agnostic, they work with the traditional stack, hyper-converged, webscale, cloud native. If you go into a customer and those bullet points are part of their strategy, it really does resonate."

Sean Finnegan, vice president of channel sales at Turbonomic, said that while the company may be setting itself up to compete with vRealize around customer budgeting, "our biggest competitor is the status quo."

"Until now, customers have done capacity management by certain tools, or guesstimations," Finnegan said. "They put in piecemeal products to help get visibility and react faster. Turbonomic handles any workload, anyplace, anytime. It's a total solution. If you're saying all I need is visibility and I have the manpower to respond myself, then vRealize is probably an okay solution, but we've found our customers are looking to get out of the break-fix cycle and take the human element out of it. The time element is critical for our customers, and our software can immediately and autonomically size and place those workloads without a human. It makes it easier."

Turbonomic 5.9 allows customers to see all their workloads simultaneously regardless of whether they're on-premises, or in AWS or Azure environments. The latest release from the seven-year-old Boston firm also automatically scales public cloud workloads, optimizes resources in real time to make sure applications get exactly the resources they need and enforces compliance policies across hybrid cloud environments.

The new platform also addresses cost, a public cloud bugbear, by adding budget control, cost forecasting and cost management capabilities.

The Turbonomic 5.9 release is a natural outgrowth of the company's original platform, which automatically matched application demand with infrastructure supply in real time, essentially allowing hybrid cloud environments to manage themselves. That means customers considering buying more data center capacity may be able to optimize with Turbonomic, potentially saving millions.

Turbonomic's platform worked with AWS and Azure previously, but the new release gives customers more detail about what workloads and applications are running in those clouds, Finnegan said.

Until now, most of Turbonomic's traction has come in private data centers, where the software can be installed and within 48 hours produce a detailed report that shows customers where they can gain immediate performance advantages and better efficiency, right down to heating and cooling.

Customers get a full inventory of what's happening in their environment, and Turbonomic can make recommendations for which applications and workloads can, or should, be moved to the cloud.

Finnegan said the message is resonating with solution providers. The company has about 260 partners, and did about $40 million in revenue through the channel last year.

"We've seen an influx of new partners, and we're seeing increased interest from existing partners," Finnegan said. "We're seeing a lot of partners that have done one or two deals come back and say, 'If I don't do this somebody else will.'"