SoftwareONE Augments PyraCloud With Multi-Cloud Enterprise Resource, Budget Management Features
SoftwareONE has unveiled an upgraded version of its well-known management platform, PyraCloud, that provides businesses with improved cloud expense and consumption tracking.
Highlighting the Swiss software expert's PyraCloud additions are a quartet of new capabilities that include tagging, resource and group management tools, which allow clients to trace consumption to specific vendor platforms, applications and business departments, as well as cost insights and enhanced analytics reporting.
SoftwareONE, No. 12 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 with Waukesha, Wis.-based U.S. operations, has found that many of its enterprise customers lack a holistic view of their organizational cloud usage, which can often comprise of a dozen or more different cloud services vendors. And it's that lack of clarity that can lead to mismanaged software budgets.
"Not only do we have to help them understand what they're buying, but we have to help them understand how they're using what they're buying," Mike Gersten, global innovation and strategy officer at SoftwareONE, told CRN. "We do that by providing transparency and allowing them to view all the resources they're consuming across multiple cloud provideers.
SoftwareONE estimates that 30 to 40 percent of their customers' cloud consumption can be traced back to shadow IT purchases. On top of that, the company has those customers overspending on cloud by roughly 30 percent. With cloud-enabled products accounting for about 20 percent of an enterprise's entire software portfolio, according to Gersten, cloud usage can significantly effect an IT budget.
In some cases, he said a team of three to four people using a single application can even affect overall consumption levels when an enterprise's cloud footprint becomes so sprawled.
"It's crazy," Gersten said. "They know they're overspending. They know the problem is too hard to solve and they buffer their budgets for the overspend. The smart ones are trying to address that issue. If they can save 30 or 40 percent on their software spend, that's money they can drive to the bottom line or be invested in innovation specific to their industry."
Gersten added that many cloud vendors offer analytics and management tools, but only relative to their specific platforms. CIOs and other decision-makers held accountable for the IT budget need a complete picture.
SoftwareONE's beefed up PyraCloud platform tracks on-premise software usage, as well, which the company believes is a significant differentiator for enterprises that still rely on several legacy, on-premise applications.
"That is SoftwareOne's value proposition," Gersten said. "We come from this 30-year history of managing software portfolios. Cloud represents still just one-fifth of the overall portfolios. A lot of hype out there for these cloud management providers. Folks are bringing tools to market not too dissimilar to PyraCloud, with respect to the cloud, but that only manages 20 percent of the portfolio. You need to manage it holistically across the entire lifecycle."