Scalr's Enhanced Cloud Cost Management Platform Ready For More Solution Provider Partners

In a multi-cloud world, cloud cost management can be a white whale for many enterprises and solution providers managing cloud environments. Scalr, a cloud management company, wants to ease the burden for partners and end customers.

Scalr, based in San Francisco, is revealing the latest generation of its hybrid cloud management platform, a solution that is gaining traction with partners. The company is looking to recruit partners that see cloud cost management as an opportunity to go deeper with their end customers, Brett Johnson, vice president of sales and channel for Scalr, told CRN.

Founded in 2009, Scalr does between 10-20 percent of its business through the channel today. The company is actively working on growing its business through partners, especially as interest in public cloud grows and cloud costs become more unwieldy for both solution providers and enterprise customers.

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"The channel is really an area that we want to invest in," Johnson said. "Enterprises are enamored by the agility public cloud offers, but how do you make that move without hurting yourself from a cost [perspective]? Scalr has built a great cloud management platform and foundation, and now it's time to go after partners."

To that end, Scalr has brought on channel veteran Larissa Crandall as its global senior director of channel sales to help pick up more partners and build targeted programs for solution providers with cloud practices.

Scalr offers a cloud management platform for managing multi-cloud infrastructure. The company on Wednesday announced its enhanced Hybrid Cloud Management Platform will include advanced visibility and budgeting for infrastructure and services, giving partners and end customers more actionable data to work with to better predict their cloud costs and right size their cloud environments or their client's environments. At the same time, business users will be freed up to use cloud services without straining the company budget or running into security or compliance issues.

The Scalr platform can be deployed across a variety of public cloud platforms, giving users a handle on cost control. The platform opens the door for partners to have more strategic conversations with their clients because they can show tangible, detailed information about their cloud deployments, such as usage reports, and make recommendations, Crandall said.

"This will help partners because they can use the platform to show clients how they can generate cost savings -- they now have a way to quantify the actual return on investment," Johnson said.

Many large solution providers, including system integrators and MSPs, are already seeing value after adding Scalr into their fledging cloud practices, Crandall said.

"Partners don't see the Scalr platform as a cost management platform they can resell, they are seeing it as a means to additional revenue streams because now they have insight into these larger vendors that maybe they didn't before," she said.

Ultimately, Scalr sees its platform as a tool that partners can use as they build their own consulting and advisory services around cloud. In fact, partners today can build the Scalr platform into a cloud project deployment plan for their end customers to drive down unnecessary cloud costs, Johnson said.

"Every customer we talk to has cloud migration initiatives. This platform gives partners a way to actually manage the success of that project," he said. "And who better than to help [enterprises] complete their projects than the partners they are working with?"