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October 21: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Bloomberg, Dataiku, Google Cloud, Oracle, Stability AI, Tableau, Tellius, TigerGraph)

Oracle CloudWorld Announcements

Oracle made a number of announcements at Oracle CloudWorld this week.

Oracle Database 23c Now in Beta
Version 23c of Oracle Database, code named “App Simple,” is now available in beta. As highlighted by the code name, improvements focused on simplifying application development, particularly for apps written using JSON, Graph, or microservices. JSON Relational Duality is Oracle’s new approach to allow data to be simultaneously used and understood as both app-friendly JSON documents and as database-friendly relational tables, allowing JSON app data to be directly queried.

Oracle Launches MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse
Oracle expanded the MySQL HeatWave portfolio with the addition of MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, which will allow customers to process and query data in object store at multi-terabyte scale. This will directly compete with Redshift and Snowflake in providing a cost-efficient, performant lakehouse offering.

Oracle Innovates Across Data and Analytics Portfolio
Oracle also announced product innovations across its data and analytics portfolio. Oracle Analytics Cloud added a semantic modeler to present the semantic model to business users in an appropriate manner; advanced composite visualizations to organize content and present data patterns and signals in a more easily understood manner; one-click automated insights that provide recommendations for visualizations; and AI and ML enhancements to connect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cognitive services to Oracle Analytics Cloud. Oracle Fusion Analytics improved their existing ERP, SCM, and HCM analytics solutions with vertical-specific enhancements, and added Oracle Fusion CX Analytics to the OFA portfolio to give sales, marketing, service, and finance users KPIs and dashboards.

Oracle and NVIDIA Team Up to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption
Finally, Oracle and NVIDIA announced a partnership that will bring NVIDIA’s complete accelerated computing stack, including tens of thousands of GPUs, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to permit AI training and deep learning inference at scale.

Funding

Stability AI Announces $101M Seed Round
Open source AI company Stability AI announced a $101M seed round at a nearly $900M valuation. Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC led the round. Stability AI will use the funding to speed up the development of open AI models across a wide variety of use cases, consumer and enterprise alike.

Tellius Raises $16M B Round
AI decision intelligence platform Tellius announced a $16M B round of funding, announced October 20. Baird Capital led the round, and all existing investors also participated: Grotech Ventures, Sands Capital Ventures, and Veraz Investments. Tellius will use the funding to expand go-to-market, hire across sales, marketing, and product engineering, and R+D for their platform.

Launches and Updates

Alteryx Announces New Analytics Cloud Capabilities, Version 22.3
At Inspire EMEA 2022, Alteryx announced the 22.3 Alteryx product release, and additional enhancements to Alteryx Analytics Cloud. Alteryx Machine Learning is now running on Alteryx Analytics Cloud, and Designer Cloud has improved Snowflake data processing performance when moving from AWS. As for Alteryx 22.3, Alteryx’s Data Connection Manager supports Azure Active Directory group authentication for Databricks and Snowflake, and integrations with third-party vaults like CyberArk and HashiCorp. 22.3 also features enhanced Google BigQuery connectivity and performance improvements.

Bloomberg Data License Content Now Available on Google Cloud
Bloomberg made its Data License content available on Google Cloud. Clients will be able to integrate this cloud data into their Google Cloud-specific workloads directly.

Tableau Launches Version 2022.3
Tableau announced version 2022.3 this week. Key new features include a Data Guide guided experience to Tableau, Table Extensions that will let customers enrich their data with advanced analytics and predictions, and adding “dynamic zone visibility” functionality to dashboards, allowing users to see only the dashboard contents that are relevant without needing to manually design multiple individual dashboards.

TigerGraph Will Support openCypher in GSQL.
TigerGraph announced this week that they would support the openCypher query language in TigerGraph’s own graph query language. Providing this support will make it easier for developers to build or migrate graph applications to TigerGraph databases.

Partnerships

Dataiku and Slalom Team Up on AI Strategy
Dataiku announced a partnership with Slalom, a global consulting firm. Slalom will provide strategic guidance to Dataiku enterprise customers on implementing AI and MLOps projects.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: IBM Turbonomic

Amalgam Insights continues to present its list of Distinguished Vendors for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. This matters because analysts assessed nearly 30 providers for this effort; only a third were able to demonstrate genuine differentiators and approaches that satisfied Amalgam Insights’ requirements for achieving Distinguished Vendor status. To that point, we already have posted profiles on SADA, Spot by NetApp, Apptio Cloudability, Yotascale, Kion, and CAST AI . We next discuss IBM Turbonomic.

WHY IBM TURBONOMIC FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Focus on application performance, which leads to savings
  • Platform configuration is automated, saving IT time and effort during deployment
  • Software learns from organizations’ actions, so recommendations improve over time

ABOUT IBM TURBONOMIC

IBM Turbonomic is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 2009, Turbonomic was acquired by IBM in 2021. IBM Turbonomic now acts as Big Blue’s solution to ensure application performance and governance across cloud environments, including public and private. Turbonomic has two offices in the United States — its headquarters in Boston and a satellite location in Newark, Delaware — as well as one in the UK and another in Canada. IBM does not publicly disclose how many Turbonomic employees it has, nor does it break out Turbonomic annual revenue or provide customer retention rates.

In terms of cloud spend under management, Turbonomic states that it does not track the amount of money its clients spend on cloud computing. Turbonomic serves Fortune 2000 customers across industries including finance, insurance, and healthcare. Turbonomic is typically considered by organizations that have at least 1,000 cloud instances or virtual machines; many support tens of thousands.

IBM TURBONOMIC’S OFFERING

IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management targets application performance and governance throughout an organization’s cloud environment, which can include public cloud (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud), private cloud (IBM, VMware), and multi-cloud environments.

The platform optimizes cloud computing, storage, database as a service, reserved instances, and Kubernetes, but does not currently address spot instances). Furthermore, it optimizes and scales based on IOPs (input/output), reservations, and discounts. Overall, IBM Turbonomic aims to ensure spend aligns to applications, preventing cost overruns and keeping applications performing optimally. While Turbonomic mainly serves IT users, Turbonomic recently teamed with Flexera to add a detailed cost-reporting module that appeals to Financial Operations (FinOps) experts.

IBM Turbonomic charges for its cloud application optimization software based on the number of resources under management. Rather than offering individual add-on capabilities, IBM Turbonomic lets clients choose more advanced capabilities by buying different licensing tiers associated with integrations to other software and processes such as IT service management, orchestrators, and application performance management. IBM Turbonomic includes technical support with all tiers. IBM Turbonomic and its third-party channel partners offer professional services as needed.

IBM Turbonomic states that its top differentiator originates from artificial intelligence that matches application demand to underlying infrastructure supply at every layer of the stack continuously in real-time with automatable resourcing decisions. As more organizations use IBM Turbonomic, the automated recommendations provided to all of its customers improve. Cloud administrators gain insight into suggested actions, such as investments to enhance performance and save money.

IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management is delivered as software-as-a-service. It works across public, private, containerized, and bare metal cloud environments. IBM Turbonomic’s reference customers include Providence Health, which has 120,000 employees; Litehouse Foods, which makes salad dressing, cheese, and other foods; and apparel maker Carhartt.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

IBM Turbonomic mainly competes against organizations’ in-house spreadsheets and mix of tools that are specific to the technologies in use. In these cases, IBM Turbonomic finds that organizations are over-provisioning cloud computing resources in the hopes of mitigating risk. Therefore, they are spending too much and only addressing application performance when something goes wrong.

IBM Turbonomic also often faces VMware CloudHealth in its prospective deals.

IBM Turbonomic states that it draws customers because of automation and recommendations that tend to result in the following business outcomes:

  • Reduction of public cloud spend by 30%
  • Increase in team productivity by 35%
  • Improvement of application performance by 20%
  • Increase in speed to market by 40%

IBM TURBONOMIC’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

IBM Turbonomic keeps its roadmap private, so details about upcoming enhancements are not public. However, Amalgam Insights believes that IBM Turbonomic will pursue improvements in sustainability reporting and GitOps resizing in the near future, and may soon pursue a deeper relationship with Microsoft Azure, given that three of these areas are of interest to IBM Turbonomic’s current client base.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations with a minimum of 1,000 cloud instances or virtual machines, and residing within the Fortune 2000, consider IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management.

Because the platform automatically configures during deployment, provides ongoing recommendations for application and cloud-configuration improvement, and continues to learn from users’ actions, organizations can observe how cloud environments are continuously optimized. This allows IT teams to support cloud consumption needs while also ensuring the organization does not overpay or underresource. In addition, FinOps professionals gain the information they need to track and budget digital transformation efforts without burdening their IT counterparts.

Combined, these capabilities are critical to organizations’ goals of delivering stewardship over their cloud environments while maintaining fiscal responsibility that best serves shareholders, investors, and staff.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: CAST AI

Cast AI - Amalgam Insights' 2022 Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost Management

Managing cloud infrastructure is no easy task, especially when containers such as Kubernetes come into play. In our ongoing effort to help organizations understand what they need to do to make the most of their cloud environments, Amalgam Insights this year briefed with a number of management and optimization vendors. We continue to publish our findings, which include analyst guidance complete with a series of vendor profiles. This installment focuses on CAST AI, a company that takes a different approach to cloud cost and optimization management by homing in on containers. Read on to learn why that is so important and to understand Amalgam Insights’ resulting recommendations for enterprises.

WHY CAST AI FOR COST CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Optimizes Kubernetes containers on a continuous basis
  • Company claims to save users an average of 63% on cloud bills
  • Cost reporting and cluster analysis provided as a free service

ABOUT CAST AI

CAST AI is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 2019, Miami-headquartered CAST AI employs 60 people in Florida and Lithuania. It raised $10 million in Series A funding in fall of 2021, following its $7.7 million seed round in late 2020. CAST AI does not look for a specific customer size; some of its users have fewer than two dozen virtual machines, while others run thousands. The privately held firm does not disclose annual revenue or how much cloud spend it manages.

CAST AI’S OFFERING

CAST AI automates and optimizes Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service, kOps running on AWS, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Cloud Platform Google Kubernetes Service as well as Kubernetes clusters running directly on CAST AI.

Cast AI users — who typically are DevOps (Development Operations) experts — may run cost reporting that includes cluster analysis and recommendations. FinOps (Financial Operations) professionals can take the reporting results and incorporate them into their practices.

The CAST AI engine goes beyond cost reporting to rearrange Kubernetes environments for the most effective outcomes. To do this, CAST AI connects to a specified app, then runs a script that installs agents to collect information about the app. After that, a report pops up that can provide recommendations for reducing the number of Kubernetes machines or changing to a different compute platform with less memory, all to cut down on cost.

If a user accepts CAST AI’s recommendations, he or she can click a button to optimize the environment in real time. This button sets off a continuous optimization function to give orders to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to rearrange itself, such as autoscaling in real time and rebalancing clusters. Users set their desired automation and alerting thresholds. CAST AI pings the app every 15 seconds and produces an hourly graph. CAST AI claims its users save an average of 63% on their cloud bills.

Pricing for CAST AI varies. CAST AI does not enforce a minimum spend requirement. Rather, it charges by the number of active, optimized CPUs. That starts at $5 per CPU per month and there are tiered discounts from 1-5,000 CPUs, then 5,001-15,000, and so on. Base subscriptions start at $200 per month and go up to $5,000 per month or more, depending on volume discounts. CAST AI provides cost reporting and cluster analysis for free, with no time limits. Users also can buy cost management as a standalone service.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

CAST AI competes most frequently against the Ocean platform from Spot by NetApp in competitive deals. For the most part, though, CAST AI “competes” against DevOps professionals trying to reduce cloud costs manually — a difficult and time-consuming effort.

CAST AI finds that it gains customers because of its engine’s ease of use and ability to make changes in real-time. This further frees DevOps experts to focus on innovative projects.

CAST AI goes to market via its website and, in Europe, Asia, and the United States, also through third-party partners.

CAST AI’s reference customers including La Fourche, a French online retailer of organic products, and ecommerce consultancy Snow Commerce.

CAST AI’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

CAST AI plans to build an air-gapped version of its engine disconnected from the Internet and fully supported within the customer’s internal environment for private cloud users in vertical markets including government and banking. Because CAST AI collects metadata to optimize Kubernetes environments, CAST AI is working on this capability to support more governed industries and organizations.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations with Kubernetes containers try CAST AI’s free trial to understand how the platform might help save money and optimize resources. Although Kubernetes has largely won as the software container of choice in DevOps environments, businesses still have not standardized on strategies to optimize the compute and storage associated with containerized workloads and services. Amalgam Insights believes that Kubernetes optimization should not be a long-term direct responsibility for developers and architects as tools emerge to define the resources that are most appropriate for running containerized applications at any given time.

Organizations worldwide are struggling to control cloud costs, especially as they pursue containerization and cloud refactorization projects associated with digital transformation. Organizations also are cleaning up pandemic-spurred cloud deployments that quickly got out of hand and have proven difficult to keep in line since then. CAST AI’s technology provides an option that DevOps engineers should consider as they seek to tighten and optimize the spend tied to applications containerized in the cloud.

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.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Kion

Organizations juggling services from the major public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — often struggle to streamline the disparate data that emerge. For businesses and government agencies with a deliberate focus on financial management, Kion can prove a management option to consider.

In Amalgam Insights’ latest profile featuring cloud cost management and optimization vendors, we discuss what Kion does and how the company differs from its competition.

WHY KION FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Single-platform approach for identity and access management, financial control, and security configuration across the top three public cloud platforms
  • Deep emphasis on compliance checks, including United States federal government compliance
  • Insight into financial management beyond spend savings to include budgeting, forecasting, and compliance

ABOUT KION

Kion is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Formerly known as cloudtamer.io, Kion was founded in 2018. While it is headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, Kion takes a remote-first approach to employment, so it has staff across the United States — more than 50 people as of May 2022. Kion reports annual revenue of between $5 million and $10 million and holds a Net Promoter Score of 81. The company serves about 45 clients collectively spending more than $500 million across IaaS and PaaS.

Most of Kion’s customers fall into three segments: government, higher education, and commercial enterprise. For the government and higher education markets, Kion helps agencies manage funding allocations, align spend with appropriations, meet standards, and ensure compliance (e.g. FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-171, CMMC). Enterprises tend to look to Kion for help in improving the engineer experience to accelerate cloud adoption.

KION’S OFFERING

Kion calls its approach to cloud governance and management “cloud enablement.” This term is intended to describe a combination of automation and orchestration, financial management, and ongoing compliance checks to gain visibility into and control over multiple clouds. 

Kion installs in the customer’s cloud account rather than as a software-as-a-service solution. Kion supports management across cloud providers and lets users integrate with identity access management tools including Okta, native Active Directory, and OneLogin; with IT service management platforms including ServiceNow, Jira, and Splunk; and with host-level vulnerability management technologies including Tenable.

Kion’s platform provides capabilities for automation and orchestration, financial management (FinOps), and continuous compliance, including self-service provisioning for use governance. For financial management, Kion users can allocate funds, receive alerts on potential budget overruns, and proactively remediate cost issues. Kion’s compliance measures contain auto-remediation for governance policy issues, as well. Kion assesses factors such as budget and funding sources to show what remains in a budget, and where that money came from to align cost management, budgeting, and forecasting. Kion’s compliance capabilities enforce policies across clouds at project and resource levels. Kion supports more than 4,500 compliance checks and provides a security control matrix that displays how cloud layers are meeting requirements.

Admins can enforce budget actions that prevent overspending in DevOps and sandbox environments. Kion pulls in data from multiple sources to auto-populate fields.

Standard support for Kion includes email with a two-business-day response time, and access to the Kion Support Center. Customers may procure annual premium support to have a dedicated technical account manager.

Kion’s pricing depends on cloud spend under management. The company sells directly through its in-house sales teams, third-party partners, and on cloud marketplaces. Kion also provides a back-end platform which can be white-labeled to support managed service providers, resellers, and system integrators.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Kion wins customers based on several operational challenges. First, it attracts users who struggle to move into the cloud quickly. Second, Kion appeals to organizations struggling with cloud spend excesses, wasted resources, and security concerns. Third, Kion lands users lacking preventive controls. Finally, the company gets new business from companies seeking to remove complexity as they provision new cloud accounts and projects.

Kion competes most often against internal processes or homegrown tools. It also competes against Spot by NetApp and CloudHealth by VMware in the financial reporting realm. On the security end, Kion faces Fugue and Turbot in competitive deals. Some organizations view Kion as a platform that integrates those products (and others), or as a tool that will eventually replace those other brands. Rather than bifurcate personas into specific operational responsibilities — say, by FinOps, SecOps, and DevOps — Kion aligns with business personas and role-based governance across the platform based on functional need and to control spend.

Kion states that customers see savings of at least 30 percent through savings opportunities and cost optimizations. With automation, Kion claims soft-dollar savings can exceed 60 percent if organizations are willing to also review staffing, process, and policy decisions. Kion’s reference customers include NASA, Indeed, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Encamp.

KION’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Kion plans to build more contextual insight to display cloud environment behaviors that are interrelated so users can make more informed decisions. Kion also intends to add more compliance policies as well as cloud platforms beyond the Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations — particularly in government, higher education, and commercial enterprise — trying to manage one or more of the top three public cloud providers consider Kion. Kion focuses on ease-of-use and cross-departmental visibility to avoid overspending and ensure security and compliance. That streamlined approach provides a single view for cloud cost and optimization management, budgeting, and technology implementation. Amalgam Insights recommends Kion for companies that seek to cut cloud costs and consider financial management to be part of a greater effort of improving operational performance associated with cloud services.

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.

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October 7: From BI to AI (Apollo GraphQL, AWS, CelerData, Domino Data Lab, Komprise, Kyndryl, SingleStore, Teradata)

Funding

SingleStore Closes Additional $30M in Series F Funding, Total Now at $146M

Database company SingleStore closed an additional $30M in F-round funding earlier this week, with Prosperity7 as a new investor. This additional investment brings SingleStore’s total for their F round up to $146M, after an initial round in September 2021 for $80M and an additional $36M in July 2022. In the interim, SingleStore has doubled its headcount, with geographic expansions to Ireland, Singapore, and Australia, and hiring continues.

Updates

Apollo GraphQL Launches GraphOS to Scale “Supergraphs”

On October 5, Apollo GraphQL debuted Apollo GraphOS. GraphOS is a platform to build, connect, and scale “supergraphs,” which are themselves architectures that bring together a company’s data, micro services, and other digital capabilities into one network to simplify data access and sourcing for app building. Key features of GraphOS include providing a centralized updated repository for schemas and pipelines, new GraphQL capabilities such as live queries and edge caching,  both cloud and self-hosting options, and security and governance capabilities to control who can access your supergraphs when and why

CelerData Launches Quick Start for StarRocks on Amazon Web Services 

On October 6, analytics platform CelerData released AWS QuickStart for StarRocks. This release deploys StarRocks on the AWS cloud, supporting quick deployment of real-time analytics and providing high concurrency while guiding users to follow AWS best practices

Domino 5.3 Previews Nexus Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Capabilities
Domino Data Lab released version 5.3 of their Enterprise MLOps platform yesterday. Key features include a private preview of Domino’s Nexus hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities, announced back in June; additional data connectors for Amazon S3 tabular data, Teradata warehouses, and Trino; and GPU-based model inference capabilities extended beyond model training to model deployment, helping bring complex models based on deep learning capabilities into production. Domino 5.3 is generally available now; companies who would like to preview Nexus can request access on the Domino Nexus website.

Komprise Rolls Out Fall 2022 Release 

Unstructured data management company Komprise released the Fall 2022 version of Komprise Intelligent Data Management. New capabilities include Komprise Smart Data Workflows, which let IT teams automate key parts of the data tagging and discovery process; and Deep Analytics, which permits authorized users outside of IT to view certain characteristics of their data and work with IT for better data management.

Partnerships

Kyndryl and Teradata Team Up for Cloud Migration
IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl and data platform Teradata announced a strategic partnership earlier this week. The companies will combine Kyndryl’s data and AI services and Teradata’s cloud analytics and data platform to help customers migrate from on-prem data warehouses to the cloud.

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September 30: From BI to AI (AWS, Databricks, DataRobot, Domino, Microsoft Azure, Qlik, Salesforce, SAS) 

Dreamforce

Salesforce Premieres Genie, the New Realtime Data Platform Behind the Customer 360 

At Dreamforce, Salesforce launched Salesforce Genie, a realtime data platform undergirding Salesforce Customer 360. Genie ingests and stores streams of realtime data and combines it with transactional Salesforce data, then turns the combined data into a unified customer record. In addition, Einstein AI can provide additional relevant personalizations and predictions based on this realtime data, and Flow can trigger actions automatically based on the same realtime data. 

Salesforce and AWS Now Let You “Bring Your Own AI” to Customer 360 

Salesforce and AWS teamed up to reveal new integrations between Salesforce and Amazon SageMaker. Joint customers will be able to use SageMaker and Einstein AU in concert to build custom AI models – to “bring your own AI” and use it in realtime across the Customer 360. Cleansed and unified realtime Salesforce customer data alongside an organization’s data from an AWS data lake or data warehouse will be jointly accessible for building and training machine learning models in SageMaker.  The underlying technology enabling these integrations is Salesforce Genie, mentioned above.

Salesforce Appoints Robin Washington Lead Independent Director of the Board 

Salesforce also announced the appointment of Robin Washington as the Lead Independent Director of the Company’s Board of Directors, succeeding Sanford Robinson. Washington has served as Director of Salesforce since 2013, and currently also chairs the Board’s Audit Committee. Washington has also served on the boards of Gilead Sciences, and currently serves on the boards of Alphabet, Honeywell International, and Vertiv Holdings Co. 

Launches and Updates

DataRobot Debuts Dedicated Managed AI Cloud

DataRobot Dedicated Managed AI Cloud is now publicly available, DataRobot announced earlier this week. The Dedicated Managed AI Cloud is a dedicated hosted version of DataRobot’s AI Cloud, managed by DataRobot experts, allowing organizations to outsource certain aspects of AI platform deployment, configuration, management, and maintenance when staffing constraints limit on-prem capabilities.

Domino Data Lab Announces New Ecosystem Solutions with NVIDIA

Domino Data Lab announced two solutions with NVIDIA ecosystem partners last week. Domino and NVIDIA have created an on-prem GPU reference architecture and an integrated MLOps solution for high-performance processing needs on NVIDIA DGX systems.

Partnerships

Qlik Launches Two More Products in Partnership with Databricks  

Qlik debuted two more solutions in its partnership with Databricks. The first is the launch of the Databricks Lakehouse (Delta) Endpoint within Qlik Data Integration, which will make it easier for customers to get data into their Delta Lakehouse. The second is the integration of Qlik Cloud with Databricks Partner Connect, improving the “trial experience” of Qlik Data Analytics within Databricks. 

SAS Viya Now Available On Azure Marketplace

SAS Viya is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, expanding on the existing SAS-Microsoft partnership. Users will be able to access the full Viya package on Azure, including SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, and SAS Model Manager, with no-code and code-centric interfaces available.

Hiring

 Debanjan Saha Named Chief Executive Officer of DataRobot

Last week, DataRobot announced that Debanjan Saha had been appointed as Chief Executive Officer. Saha originally joined DataRobot in February 2022 as President and Chief Operating Officer, and served as DataRobot’s interim CEO when Dan Wright stepped down in July. Prior to DataRobot, Saha was the VP/GM of Data Analytics at Google, and the VP GM of Aurora and RDS at Amazon. 

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Yotascale

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.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Apptio Cloudability

Doing cloud cost and optimization management well often calls for the help of an external vendor. That’s why Amalgam Insights has been publishing our in-depth series on the challenges associated with running a cloud cost and optimization management practice, as well as reasons to rely on third-party platforms and services for assistance.

With that in mind, Amalgam Insights presents the third of our ten vendor profiles — this one featuring Apptio Cloudability. (As a refresher, the first profile focused on SADA ; the second on Spot by NetApp.)

Read on for our analysis, which is part of our new Vendor SmartList report,Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available to download after purchase.

THE BOTTOM LINE: WHY APPTIO CLOUDABILITY FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

ABOUT APPTIO CLOUDABILITY

Apptio Cloudability is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management.

Cloudability was founded in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, to manage cloud billing and usage cost data. It was acquired by Apptio in 2019 to add cloud cost management and optimization to ApptioOne’s capabilities. Bellevue, Washington-based Apptio supports more than 1,200 employees in offices in the United States, London, Sydney, Bangalore, and Krakow. Apptio serves midmarket organizations and enterprises, many of which fall within the Fortune 100.

Across its financial management portfolio, Apptio manages $650 billion in technology budget and Cloudability managed more than $9 billion in cloud spend in 2019 when it was acquired. The privately held company does not disclose how many customers it currently has, its annual revenue or other details including customer retention rates or Net Promoter Score.

APPTIO CLOUDABILITY’S OFFERING

Apptio brought in Cloudability in 2019 to augment its existing technology management capabilities; that strategy includes its October 2018 acquisition of FittedCloud to optimize cloud resources and the October 2020 acquisition of SaaSLicense for Software as a Service management.

Apptio Cloudability comprises cloud computing management and optimization — and, through the separate Total Cost module, reporting and analytics — for multicloud environments, containers, and software as a service (through the SaaSLicense acquisition). The platform is designed for IT, finance, and business teams seeking to manage cloud costs, although the company states that it now talks more with head executives — CEOs, CFOs, and cloud directors in Cloud Center of Excellence groups and procurement — during the sales process.

Apptio Cloudability ingests, normalizes, and structures billing usage data from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. This approach is used on an ongoing basis to continuously improve the economics of running cloud environments with financial operations (FinOps) principles in mind. Apptio Cloudability also delivers rightsizing recommendations for an organization’s cloud environment and AWS savings. Apptio Cloudability sees its users spend the most money on AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure, then Google Cloud. The platform’s savings plans capabilities show users where they can reduce and optimize cloud costs while also forecasting their spend.

Apptio Cloudability sets its pricing on the cloud spend covered under one or three-year contracts. It considers discounts on a case-by-case basis. Apptio Cloudability does not require a minimum number of users or spending. The standard Cloudability package comes with basic help desk and technical assistance. Add-on options include professional services (e.g., building a FinOps practice), training, and certification delivered through the FinOps Foundation. Apptio Cloudability offers optimization and allocation-assistance packages separately; they are priced based on the size of work required. Finally, the TotalCost module is available as an add-on, with tiered pricing based on annual cloud spend.

Through integrations and mapping, TotalCost covers all the major public cloud providers, as well as Oracle, Alibaba, and IBM, and ancillary cloud vendors including Snowflake and CrowdStrike. Cloudability uses TotalCost as a means for helping organizations better grasp all the cloud platforms and services influencing their total cost of cloud ownership, and charge back expenses as needed.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Apptio Cloudability states that it wins business for its focus on FinOps capabilities, as well as its savings plans and rightsizing modules. The latter modules provide additional analytics and machine-learning capabilities for clients, allowing Apptio Cloudability to generate recommendations through proprietary algorithms that can analyze as much as 15 years’ worth of a company’s data.

Apptio Cloudability goes to market both through direct sales and through an emerging indirect channel made up of managed service providers and consultants.

APPTIO CLOUDABILITY’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Apptio Cloudability plans to keep investing in providing more detailed optimization recommendations for discounts, developing integrations with cloud data and hyperscaler vendors to support sourcing workflow, and supporting localization, currency, and data sovereignty updates to make Cloudability available in more geographies.

Amalgam Insights expects that Apptio will also invest in capabilities to support managed service providers with improved white-labeling and integration, and to continue developing container cost optimization capabilities for Kubernetes and Docker-based workloads.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations, particularly those with multiple clouds, interested in a FinOps focus vet Apptio Cloudability. Apptio should be considered by organizations seeking to control costs and budget resources. Because of Apptio’s history in supporting FinOps as a formal practice, organizations with formal FinOps training or experience should assess Apptio. Amalgam Insights also recommends that organizations seeking to provide additional cloud cost visibility to non-IT executives (such as finance, accounting, and procurement) involved with cloud decision-making and tracking in support of those processes evaluate Apptio.

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.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Spot by NetApp

As we’ve noted throughout our series on cloud cost and optimization management, choosing a vendor for this practice is no easy feat. A number of companies provide software and services germane to making the most of cloud environments — it’s tough for organizations to sift through all the marketing messaging. Amalgam Insights has taken on much of that footwork on behalf of enterprises, and we continue to present our findings in our series, which includes vendor profiles published in no particular order. This second profile looks at Spot by NetApp.

WHY SPOT BY NETAPP (INCLUDING CLOUDCHECKR) FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Continuous cost optimization, not just one-time, across public clouds
  • Automated platform that reduces burden on operations personnel
  • Includes development, finance, security, and cloud operations based on both in-house development and acquisitions

ABOUT NETAPP

NetApp is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 1992, NetApp has grown from a premises-based provider of computer storage to its current iteration as hybrid cloud data services company. As of 2021, NetApp employed 10,500 people around the globe, across all of its divisions. The company reported $5.74 billion in revenue in 2021. In 2020, NetApp acquired Spot to gain cloud cost optimization capabilities and enter the cloud cost market. In 2021, NetApp bought cloud financial and operational optimization vendor CloudCheckr, adding those capabilities to its Spot by NetApp portfolio. CloudCheckr reported more than $4 billion in cloud spend under management when NetApp acquired it. NetApp’s cloud cost control and optimization offering targets midsized and large enterprises seeking to optimize cloud costs scaling up to Fortune 500 firms.

NETAPP’S OFFERING

The Spot by NetApp portfolio brings together a variety of organic and acquired capabilities to create a platform that gives professionals in development, security, finance, and cloud operations holistic, cross-departmental insight. The acquired companies include cloud optimizer Spot and cloud cost management solution CloudCheckr. Spot brings expertise in managing containers such as Kubernetes, which can rack up cloud costs quickly. CloudCheckr offers the visibility and governance around cost and security, including the allocation and chargeback of cloud computing costs to specific departments.

Spot shows which aspects of the cloud environment need right-sizing with more than 600 best-practices checks around cost management, security and compliance, usage and performance, and availability. Spot sets parameters to implement and automate recommendations for procurement, finance, security, and IT to all share visibility to the organization’s cloud infrastructure (including containers, virtual machines, data and web applications, and micro-services).

Spot achieves this combination of operational and financial visibility by combining CloudCheckr with its already existing platforms: Eco (for finance), Spot Security (for security teams), Spot PC (for cloud operations), and Elastigroup and Ocean (for developers). CloudCheckr delivers the visualization capabilities and best-practices checks that help assure continuous optimization.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

The Spot portfolio competes most against do-it-yourself cloud cost optimization and management tools, as well as vendors including VMware CloudHealth and IBM Turbonomic. The company finds that it wins deals among customers seeking a combination of analytics, visibility, automation, and governance and security (via the CloudCheckr platform).

As such, the Spot by NetApp portfolio combines the functionalities that affect cloud spend and governance with process automation to support cloud savings. Furthermore, NetApp provides dashboards and report visualizations for greater collaboration among users.

NetApp goes to market through its direct sales teams as well as a large contingent of managed services providers (MSPs), many of whom came to the vendor through the CloudCheckr acquisition. Capabilities for MSPs include:

  • Automation and streamlining of cloud services billing
  • Ability to offer cloud desktops as a service
  • Improved cloud security and compliance
  • Ability to support a FinOps practice
  • Reserved instances arbitrage, custom rates, and charges
  • White-labeling for interface and reports

NetApp’s reference customers for cloud cost management include Samsung, HPE, IBM, University of Notre Dame, and Sony.

NETAPP’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

NetApp intends to keep growing its Spot portfolio. To that end, the company in spring of 2022 acquired Instaclustr, which offers a fully managed open-source database, pipeline, and workflow applications as a service. This purchase will bolster Spot’s capabilities to support cloud operations. NetApp also plans to continue building its MSP channel.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations seeking financial and operational control of complex cloud environments consider Spot, either based on the scale of operations (typically $1 million+ annual spend), multi-cloud support, and the importance of cloud computing to the organization’s core operations. Developer teams or smaller organizations can also deploy Spot to target specific projects or workloads. The Spot portfolio, with its automation, workflow management, and analytics, offers insight into four key spend areas of operations — development, finance, security, and cloud. This breadth allows each group to gain visibility into other departments and to coordinate and align efforts to optimize cloud computing environments.

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.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: SADA Vendor Profile

Over the past few weeks, Amalgam Insights has delivered an in-depth look at the state of organizations’ cloud cost management and optimization initiatives, and discussed the challenges associated with improving those activities.

A significant challenge includes choosing the right vendor from among the many. Indeed, sifting through marketing and sales noise proves no easy task. Organizations often don’t know whether they would benefit most by teaming with a vendor directly, or by partnering with a managed service provider or professional services consultant — or by using a mix.

The options quickly become overwhelming for IT, finance, procurement, and other leaders responsible for improving how the organization spends money on cloud computing. In fact, in response (to some degree), some companies still try to manage and optimize their cloud resources through spreadsheets and other homegrown approaches. Manual practices, however, fail the organization. There are just too many cloud services and infrastructure considerations in even a single company to accurately track and manage without automation, tagging, cross-charging, and other imperative capabilities.

Therefore, as part of our continuing efforts to educate end users, Amalgam Insights presents the next portion of our Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession series: profiles of distinguished cloud cost management and optimization vendors.

Each of the companies earning Amalgam Insights’ “Distinguished Vendor” badge has undergone rigorous evaluation through briefings, presentations, and documentation analysis. Over the coming weeks as we publish more vendor profiles, note that we do so in no particular order. With that, we begin with SADA.

WHY SADA FOR COST CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Takes a best-practices consulting approach
  • Offers professional services and fully managed service approach
  • Focuses on helping clients build skills so they can continue saving money independently

ABOUT SADA

SADA is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. SADA is a managed services provider (MSP) that supports enterprises. Founded in 2000, the company typically works only with Google Cloud as a managed cloud computing vendor. However, the expertise and recommendations from its cloud cost and optimization team span multiple cloud environments. SADA is based in Los Angeles with offices in Armenia and India; overall, SADA employs around 750 people. The MSP does not disclose its annual revenue, number of clients, or amount of cloud computing spend under management. SADA’s cloud cost and optimization consultants are designed to help clients across verticals who spend more than $2 million per year on cloud computing.

SADA’S OFFERING

SADA does not develop cloud cost or optimization management software. Rather, its consultants specialize in Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations), showing enterprises how to save money — such as running non-production workloads only during work hours. At the same time, SADA’s experts teach enterprise FinOps professionals how to understand and oversee their cloud spending.

SADA delivers its assistance through various professional services packages. For example, the MSP can help configure cloud cost management tools, expose insights, demonstrate how to pull in business intelligence resources such as Tableau, and share best practices with the enterprise’s FinOps personnel. This can include identifying other people within the organization — from departments such as IT and procurement — who should join the FinOps team for the benefit of controlling and making the most of cloud computing spending. Along the way, SADA’s cloud cost management and optimization experts will produce assets such as runbooks and toolkits that clients can refer to as they improve their internal operations.

Standard FinOps services from SADA include in-person consultations, written reports with optimization suggestions, creation of database scripts for BigQuery to improve reporting, assistance in customizing tools such as Apptio Cloudability, and delivering customized runbooks and live enablement sessions.

Each professional service package features a fixed fee for a specific number of months. Pricing depends on which package and how much an organization spends each year. An enterprise typically needs a minimum of $2 million in annual cloud computing expenses to support SADA’s fee structure. SADA aims to save clients several times what it charges but does not make guarantees prior to meeting with clients as the company cannot promise an amount saved until consultants understand the depth of the problems on a case-by-case basis.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Because of its people-first, FinOps-only approach, SADA finds that it does not face much competition. It does not compete against platforms at all. SADA’s consultants might work alongside an enterprise’s systems integrator, such as Accenture or Deloitte, but those firms tend to specialize beyond FinOps.

The SADA cloud cost and optimization management team generally finds its customers by word of mouth, through referrals, or from Google Cloud itself. SADA conducts workshops and experience labs with Google Cloud’s own FinOps practice, too. SADA does not publicly disclose its reference customers. However, the company gave Amalgam Insights access to customers so that analysts could verify that SADA serves organizations with multi-billion dollar revenues.

SADA’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

In terms of a roadmap, SADA’s cloud cost management and optimization team intends to reach more technical professionals. That way, FinOps principles can carry over more into departments including IT, spreading greater cloud financial discipline throughout the organization.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations spending at least $2 million per year on cloud computing consider SADA for FinOps guidance to reduce unnecessary spending if they are seeking to bolster the capabilities of their internal staff. Managing and optimizing cloud spending requires expertise, and organizations can thrive by empowering their own people to handle those requirements. First, though, they need to learn the nuances of what impacts cloud spending and the subsequent best practices for managing those factors, which SADA’s consultants demonstrate and impart.

Consider SADA if your organization is seeking to learn how to manage cloud expenses, but is not in search of a vendor to permanently manage cloud expenses. SADA does not aim to stay within an organization indefinitely to support cloud costs. Instead, the MSP promotes a “teach to fish” ethos so enterprises eventually can become their own cloud FinOps experts. As cloud computing continues to enable new and more business models, products, and services, strengthening the enterprise’s FinOps and IT skills will prove vital to remaining competitive.

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.