As Amalgam Insights continues to present independent profiles of vendors in the cloud cost management and optimization space, we next highlight a company that takes an engineer-specific approach. This differentiator takes aim at organizations with a certain level of maturity within their cloud environments, as well as a particular spend threshold. Read on to learn more about Yotascale and to glean Amalgam Insights’ recommendations.
WHY YOTASCALE FOR CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION
- Engineer-specific design for cloud cost ownership
- Consistent view of cloud costs for all users
- Normalized and automated tagging for cloud resource tracking
ABOUT YOTASCALE
Yotascale is noted as an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. A relative newcomer in the cloud cost and optimization management space, Yotascale, founded in 2015, states that it manages more than $1 billion in cloud computing spend across infrastructure, platforms, and software. The Palo Alto-based company targets enterprises and mid-market organizations across verticals including media and entertainment, financial services, healthcare, transportation, and real estate.
These users typically spend at least $3 million per year on cloud computing, as spend below that level is often handled through cloud service providers’ native tools. Yotascale has raised $24 million; its most recent round in October 2020 raised $13 million in B series funding. The company currently employs fewer than 50 people and does not disclose its revenue or client retention rate.
YOTASCALE’S OFFERING
Yotascale started to design its cloud cost management and optimization platform with engineers in mind, followed by cloud operations experts and finance professionals. The company did this to help organizations empower engineers to own responsibility for cloud costs. Yotascale’s perspective states that engineers understand the impact of performance
changes on expenses, so they are ideally positioned to oversee those adjustments. As such, Yotascale built an interface that relies on fewer modules than some other software vendors in the cloud cost management space. In Yotascale, all users have the same view of cost data presented in their organization’s business context (although depending on their role, individuals can view the data through a customizable lens) to prevent confusion among departments. However, role-based access is supported to ensure users only have access to data according to their role, as well as alerts and recommendations that apply to their jobs.
Once configured, the Yotascale software helps normalize tag names across cloud providers and services, and provides automated tagging policies for cloud resources in the organization’s preferred nomenclature. That way, users can see an all-in-one view of their multi-cloud resources as well as containerized workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, as of May 2022. Yotascale has plans to add Google Cloud to its roster, rounding out its coverage of the current market-leading hyperscalers.
Yotascale bases its pricing on a percent of monthly resource hours of services (such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service), rather than by percent of the total bill. Yotascale offers tiered pricing, typically starting at a cloud usage level of 200,000 hours per month. Standard features and services provided by Yotascale include:
- AWS/Azure spend under management
- Inventory of AWS accounts or Azure subscriptions
- User accounts
- Billing data processing
- Cost reduction recommendations
- Billing data anomaly detection
The base pricing package includes all Yotascale features as well as capabilities to provide insight into cloud carbon footprints so organizations can reduce compute power and support sustainability initiatives.
Prior to launching its application in production, Yotascale works with each customer to create the business context for automated tagging. The process can take as little as two weeks, depending on the end user’s readiness and existing documentation. Installing and onboarding the Yotascale software itself takes less than an hour. Yotascale’s reference customers include Zoom, Hulu, Compass, Lime, Okta, and Klarna. Yotascale sells through its direct sales teams as well as a third-party channel that includes consultants and managed service providers.
COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING
Yotascale finds that it competes most often against organizations’ internal spreadsheets, as well as first-generation deployments of VMware’s CloudHealth and Apptio Cloudability. Yotascale states that it can reduce cloud computing costs by up to 50% compared to existing cloud cost management efforts. Yotascale states that its customer wins are based on the following: an engineer-specific focus and the ability to assign assets to engineers; its emphasis on tag normalization; its all-in-one views; and data that show how changes will impact performance and cost.
YOTASCALE’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
Yotascale next plans to build support for Google Cloud Platform cost management and provide self-service onboarding automation. It also intends to add more integrations as users seek to access existing cost management, billing, and sourcing tools as they consolidate data.
AMALGAM INSIGHTS RECOMMENDATIONS
Amalgam Insights recommends that enterprise and mid-market organizations seeking to empower engineers with cloud cost responsibility and spending a minimum of $3 million per year on cloud computing consider Yotascale. Yotascale is built to support engineers seeking to support accounting requests, tagging automation, and service usage requests for cloud cost management demands that exceed in-house capabilities.
Need More Guidance Now?
Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.