Virtana strengthens its position in Cloud Cost Optimisation

I recently caught up with the folks at Virtana to get a briefing on the progress in development of the Virtana Platform announced at the back end of last year. The first two modules of the platform, Migrate and Optimize, have been released and are contributing to a real shift in their focus and positioning towards multi-cloud management.

Given the growing importance for businesses of Cloud Cost Optimisation, and the emergence of the management discipline of FinOps (which my Bloor colleague David Terrar describes succinctly in a recent blog) the conversation focused on the recently released Optimize module. For me, the key message from Virtana is “know before you go”. Taken together, Migrate and Optimize enable an organisation to understand what apps and services to migrate, how they will perform in the cloud, and then optimise and manage cloud usage and control costs.

The Optimize module does all the things you would expect a cloud cost optimisation tool to do in terms of managing capacity and usage, minimising waste and maximising price effectiveness, for example in the area of reserved instances. Virtana’s history has always been about the monitoring and management of large-scale systems in real time. This is evident in the real time, and often autonomous nature of the Optimize functionality.

It is also good to see that Oracle and IBM Clouds, as well as the traditional big three hyperscalers are currently covered by the Migrate service, and they claim that other Clouds could be added relatively quickly and simply in the future.

I think we are now starting to see how Virtana’s merger with LoadDynamiX in 2016 and the subsequent acquisitions of Xangati and Metricly are bearing fruit. For businesses struggling with the complexity of capacity management and pricing in a multi-cloud environment, and for those businesses just starting out on their Cloud journeys, the combination of “know before you go” and real-time resource optimisation will be a key component of a more collaborative and inclusive FinOps approach to managing the cost of the Cloud effectively.