IT systems management vendor Uptime Software has introduced
a new tool designed to help businesses get a handle on the real cost of cloud
computing.
Uptime Software’s cloud-based tool is designed to provide accurate
real-time cost information about cloud computing. The tool was designed with
SaaS providers and MSPs in mind to help them price their end services to
customers, company executives told Channel Insider
“We built that MSP and service provider model in the basic
model of the tool,” ” Uptime Software’s Nick Johnson, director of marketing,
told Channel Insider. “When you deploy, you know how much it is going to cost.”
The tool can also be used by end-user companies looking for more of a sense of
what these cloud services will cost.
From month to month, companies may find themselves
wondering, “why is this bill 4 times as much as last month’s bill? It’s a model
that doesn’t work. It’s like going to the supermarket but there are no prices
on anything,” Johnson said. “We’ve
provided all cost data real time so that at the top level the CIO can see right
now what cloud deployment is costing him this month. And it changes if someone
deploys stuff or takes stuff out.”
That feature is helpful for organizations that spin up a lot
of demos. For a company that forgets to turn off the demo the price can go from
$9 that month to $800, Johnson said.
In addition, IT management can look at costs by service
level agreement, user group or IT silo.
Plus, user companies can get a projection of what it will
cost to put any particular application into the cloud before deploying that
application. Uptime Software executives
said that the accuracy of Uptime’s numbers is within one to two percentage
points of the actual numbers. If providers change their prices, the tool
reflects those. Previously companies would have to go into a modeling tool and
redo everything to see how price changes would affect their costs.
Initially the service will work with Amazon’s cloud and Uptime
Software will soon be adding in Rackspace, Terramark and others. The cooperation of the cloud provider is not
required to gain the cost information. Ultimately, Uptime Sofware would like to
offer instant cost comparisons among the various cloud providers for a host of
different applications.
Uptime Software’s new cloud cost tool is available from its
website Uptime Cloud, and it enters beta on June 21.
Here’s a list, direct from the company of what it lets MSPs,
solution providers and end user customers do.
- Immediately see how much cloud costs by application,
line-of-business (LOB), user, location, account and instance in real-time
- View one or multiple cloud accounts (individually or aggregated)
through a single dashboard
- Identify departmental or LOB cloud usage (for SLAs, Billing, etc).
- Clear,
automated "cost of cloud" estimates and cost saving recommendations
that remove the risk of cloud deployments
- Trend and predict future cloud costs by hour, day, month, year or
any custom time frame
- Quickly
meet dynamic and changing needs to avoid cloud performance and capacity
nightmares
- Track real-time and historical cloud capacity usage
- Highlight forgotten, zombie and under-utilized cloud resources
- Quickly identify overloaded and bogged down cloud instances.
Cloud Computing 
