Spotinst Rebrands As Spot, Adds Cloud Visualization Tool

The startup once focused on helping companies take advantage of discounts cloud providers offer when they have extra compute capacity, but it now offers a range of CloudOps tools for optimizing performance and spending across multi-cloud environments

Spotinst was born with a solution to better enable consumption of the spot instances offered by large cloud providers, but an expanding CloudOps portfolio in recent years has motivated the startup to rebrand.

Going forward, the Israeli-American company will go by Spot—a pithier moniker its leaders feel reflects a shift from the original, dedicated product that helps companies take advantage of the discounts public clouds offer when they have unused capacity to a comprehensive platform for optimizing cloud environments and adopting CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code DevOps processes, CEO Amiram Shachar told CRN.

“We’re shortening the name, but broadening the state of capabilities,” Shachar said. The new name is “something we can grow in.”

[Related: Public Cloud Propels Slight Increase In 2019 Data Center Spending]

Highlighting the motivation to rebrand is a new product called Cloud Analyzer that delivers holistic visibility into cloud environments and recommendations for provisioning resources to ramp performance and availability while reducing costs, Shachar said.

Spot’s shift to an end-to-end platform was accelerated with last year’s acquisition of StratCloud, a startup with a similar product, only focused on enabling adoption of Reserved Instances, which score discounts from clouds for customers agreeing to long-term commitments rather than being flexible as to when they consume resources.

The StratCloud business was almost negligible from a revenue standpoint when that acquisition happened, but it has now grown to $4 million. Other organic advances in automated deployment optimization and AI-enabled rightsizing have propelled Spot to now boast around 1,500 customers.

But something was still missing, the CEO said.

“We had the aha moment last year as we started to close big deals,” he said. CIOs complained that they sometimes had hundreds of cloud accounts and didn’t know where to start, or how to assess, their strategies for optimizing their spend.

Cloud Analyzer, in solving that dilemma, can provide an entrance-point into the broader platform, with the new tool integrated with the rest of the CloudOps portfolio, Shachar told CRN.

Customers of major cloud provider can plug in to Cloud Analyzer, which auto-discovers infrastructure, workloads, anomalies, usage, spending trends, and other assets in their cloud environments, then prepares a plan for how to deploy, or redeploy, their cloud footprint in the most efficient way, he said.

That includes which instances can be optimized by spot, or reserve, pricing plans. With one click those options can become part of the customer’s cloud-provisioning pipeline, Shachar said.