RightScale Announces General Availability of Cloud Analytics

SANTA BARBARA, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 4, 2014) - RightScale® Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud portfolio management, today announced the general availability of RightScale Cloud Analytics, the first multi-cloud cost management solution that integrates with a cloud management platform to enable users to take action on insights and implement budget controls.

RightScale Cloud Analytics, first announced in beta in November 2013, is an enterprise-grade cost management solution that provides sophisticated cloud usage and cost analysis as well as forecasting and scenario planning across major public and private clouds. Cloud Analytics is part of the RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management platform, which includes Cloud Analytics, Cloud Management, and Self-Service.

"RightScale Cloud Analytics enables you to visualize, forecast, and optimize costs across your entire portfolio of public and private clouds," said Hassan Hosseini, product manager for Cloud Analytics. "The response to Cloud Analytics has been extremely positive. In just a few months, more than 1,000 customers participated in the Cloud Analytics public beta program."

"As a cloud-first SaaS company, cloud costs are a significant line item in our budget. We've always focused on managing our cloud expenses -- in fact we've cut our cloud spending by half over the past year using our internal tools while supporting substantial growth in our business," said Ida Kane, chief financial officer at RightScale. "RightScale Cloud Analytics can also help other organizations gain much greater visibility into where they can optimize costs."

"Audi's customer expects nothing less than the best luxury brand experience, therefore the Audi digital ecosystem of services, applications and products must exceed expectations at every level. We must constantly optimize and enrich our platform infrastructure to make that possible," said Jeff Titus, GM, Digital Technology Solutions and Strategy, Audi of America, VW Group, Region Americas. "This is why it is so important for us to work with RightScale. RightScale helps us avoid vendor lock-in with any one cloud provider, ensures that we have the very best in cloud managed services, and, with the help of RightScale Cloud Analytics, ensures that we are on the appropriate and most cost-effective cloud infrastructure at all times."

"The agility benefits of the public cloud also comes with variability and unpredictability in costs," said Joe Emison, CTO of BuildFax. "This is due to both wanted expenses, from business growth, as well as unwanted expenses, like forgetting to shut down servers. RightScale Cloud Analytics provides automated emails that give me the right level of detail to help me understand quickly whether I am on budget and identify any unexpected cloud usage. I've used all the cloud cost management tools and RightScale Cloud Analytics is the most useful."

"As a CIO, RightScale Cloud Analytics is just the sort of thing that I need to understand and reduce cloud costs," said Tim Jones, CIO of MoneySuperMarket. "We look forward to using it to set expectations with C-level management and our board of directors on our future operating costs of private, hybrid, and public clouds."

Since the beta was first launched, several new capabilities and benefits have been added to Cloud Analytics including:

• Scheduled Reports: With Cloud Analytics, you can schedule automated daily, weekly, and monthly reports to come straight to your email inbox so that you have complete visibility into your cloud computing costs on a regular basis. The reports reveal trends in cloud costs, highlighting potential issues before they significantly impact your bill. If there are unexpected changes, you can quickly jump into your Cloud Analytics account directly from a link in the email to investigate further.
• Enhanced Scenario Builder: Enterprises can compare different instance types and clouds as they map out future cloud usage. Scenario Builder helps you accurately forecast the cost of moving applications to the cloud, the costs of using different clouds/resources, the costs associated with increased cloud usage, and the impact of buying AWS Reserved Instances (RIs).
• Budget Alerts: Your cloud users, managers, and finance teams can get alerted when budgets are exceeded or when cost overruns are projected based on current spend rates.
• Identifying waste: Cloud Analytics lets you identify zombie cloud instances: servers that got stranded during boot oftentimes unbeknownst to the user.
• Multi-account Reserved Instance visibility: AWS users can now leverage their own consolidated billing structure to analyze RI usage across accounts. This enables AWS customers to make better decisions on RI purchases and ensure that they are using already-purchased RIs.

Additional resources:

• 2 Simple Ways to Stop Blowing Your Cloud Budget
• Analyze Scenarios for AWS Reserved Instances to Reduce Cloud Costs
• Cloud Cost Savings: Understanding Why Cloud Spend Is Up (or Down)
• Track and Manage Your Private Cloud Costs Like a Boss
• Keep Your Cloud Costs Down Through Internal Collaboration
• Avoid Bill Shock with Automated Cloud Cost Reports

About RightScale
RightScale® Inc. Cloud Portfolio Management enables leading enterprises to accelerate delivery of cloud-based applications that engage customers and drive top-line revenue while optimizing cloud usage to reduce risk and costs. With RightScale, IT organizations can deliver instant access to a portfolio of public, private, and hybrid cloud services across business units and development teams while maintaining enterprise control. RightScale Consulting Services help companies develop cloud strategies, deliver cloud projects, and optimize cloud usage. RightScale also offers PlanForCloud.com, a free cloud cost management tool based on a global database of more than 12,000 price points from cloud providers, which enables organizations to perform sophisticated cloud cost forecasting. Since 2007, leading enterprises including Pearson International, Intercontinental Hotels Group, and PBS have launched millions of servers through RightScale.

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