Cloud Cruiser, vendor of a cloud management platform that helps customers meter, assess and optimize their cloud economics, on Tuesday moved up the stack, releasing a configurable application intended to simplify implementation of Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company's first Software-as-a-Service product, called Cloud Cruiser 16, hastens time to value for customers as they're trying to get a handle on complex cloud deployments, Fraser McKay, head of the product, told CRN.
The key monitoring and prescriptive capabilities developed during four years of bringing to market the cloud management platform have been distilled into the SaaS offering, McKay said.
[Related: Cloud Cruiser Delivers Templates For Assessing Economics Of 'Big 5' Clouds]
Developing a simpler delivery mechanism for cloud monitoring was motivated by seeing a number of customers who, more than a year into a cloud-transformation initiative, realized they hadn't put in all the appropriate controls to take advantage of cloud self-service and provisioning in a responsible, fiscally practical manner, McKay told CRN.
IT leaders told Cloud Cruiser they were so focused on implementing their organizations' cloud strategies and driving adoption that they often neglected cost-management and optimization, he said.
But without those components, the financial benefits of cloud are erased, and the deployments themselves become unruly, McKay said.
If public clouds like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services were a car, "Cloud Cruiser is the steering wheel," McKay told CRN.
The developer realized that SaaS provides a more effective, easier to implement and more democratic delivery method for managing cloud spend and usage on AWS, Azure and Google, McKay told CRN.
"They need a control plane that keeps up with the agility of [Infrastructure-as-a-Service] platforms run by enterprises," he said.
"Customers said, 'Lead us, we're not cloud experts.' "
Distributing a platform relies on a relatively heavy services component for leveraging the solution, McKay told CRN. That presents a headwind of needing to train users at scale.
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