Expedient Brings Cost Optimization To Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Environments

With Cost CTRL, customers will be better able to set budgets around their cloud spend and analyze workloads to determine the right fit from a cost perspective in terms of where workloads should land, says Michael Fulton, Expedient’s vice president of innovation and strategy.

Co-location and cloud services provider Expedient Wednesday introduced its Expedient Cost CTRL Suite, a new technology aimed at helping businesses understand their multi-cloud costs and how to better optimize their cloud spend.

The Expedient Cost CTRL Suite is the latest in a number of offerings in Expedient’s broader line of services to help business users and their solution providers take advantage of the cloud, said Michael Fulton, vice president of innovation and strategy for Pittsburgh-based Expedient, which was named to CRN’s 2021 Managed Service Provider 500 list.

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“Cost CTRL is part of a broader suite of Expedient services to support customers in any environment they want to work in, including in the data center, on-premises, in private clouds or in hyperscale clouds,” Fulton told CRN. “This suite includes Security CTRL, Operations CTRL and, coming in the third quarter, Compliance CTRL.”

Development of the Expedient Cost CTRL Suite was driven by customers’ struggles with multi-cloud environments, security issues and cost management, Fulton said.

“These are three of the top five issues clients are most concerned about,” he said. “We want to help customers deal with these three issues.”

Cost CTRL provides organizations with full visibility into their costs as a way to control them, Fulton said.

With Cost CTRL, customers will be better able to set budgets around their cloud spend and analyze workloads to determine the right fit from a cost perspective in terms of where workloads should land, he said. “Whatever the environment you try to land on, we give you full cost information,” he said.

Cost CTRL also provides reports to help optimize costs over time, as well as recommendations to get optimized solutions, Fulton said.

“And it’s all updated in near-real time, leveraging real-time updates from the cloud providers,” he said. “So you always have up-to-date information when trying to optimize.”

vCore, which has partnered with Expedient for about two years, has been working with the vendor on several of its CTRL products in its labs, said Brent Piatti, technology director for the cloud platform and services team of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based solution provider.

“The different CTRL suites provide clients the ability to get visibility across all their clouds, both public and private,” Piatti told CRN. “The industry does not see clients as all-private or all-public cloud. So it’s important to have that visibility. Our own customers, even if they go 90 percent into public clouds, they will have some components on-premises.”

The biggest advantage of Cost CTRL is the cost optimization potential, Piatti said.

“Ten percent to 40 percent of customers’ cloud spend is overcommitted,” he said. “There’s a huge potential for right-sizing that spend. We’re helping customers choose where and how to put the workloads in cloud environments, public or private, and need tools like this to help drive the decisions.”

In addition to Cost CTRL, Expedient recently launched a free cloud assessment application that scans a customer’s entire cloud infrastructure and makes recommendations for changes, Fulton said.

John McKenna, vice president of channel and strategic initiatives for Expedient, told CRN that about 25 percent of Expedient’s sales currently go through channel partners, with that number expected to grow to 33 percent to 50 percent by year-end.

“A lot of our partners offer managed services,” McKenna said. “We lay our services on top of their services. For example, if a partner has a security focus, we can layer a consistent SOC {Security Operations Center] for each customer.”

Most of Expedient’s channel partners have Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform experience, he said.