Uptime Software launches uptimeCloud

A while ago I had the opportunity to speak with uptime software's CTO, Alex Bewley, and its Director of Marketing, Nick Johnson. I put the conversation entry in my LISF (last in stays forever) queue so that I wouldn't forget to comment on Uptime's new product uptimeCloud. As sometimes happens, that queue entry didn't pop up at the appropriate time. It took a call from their PR agency to remind me that I had promised to comment on their announcement. Sorry guys.

Here's what uptime had to say about its announcement

Uptime released its newest product, uptimeCloud, offering the first real-time, integrated cloud cost and cloud capacity management software as a service (SaaS) tool. uptimeCloud eliminates confusing and complex cloud vendor pricing by delivering users visibility into how much cloud computing is costing in real-time, across applications, services, line-of-business (LOB), user location and instance.

The release of uptimeCloud includes:

• Real-time Cloud Cost Monitoring
  • Immediately see how much cloud costs by application, line-of-business (LOB), user, location, account and instance in real-time
  • View one or multiple cloud accounts (individually or aggregated) through a single dashboard
  • Identify departmental or LOB cloud usage (for SLAs, Billing, etc).

• Predict Cloud Costs and Increase Cloud Savings
  • Clear, automated “cost of cloud” estimates and cost saving recommendations that remove the risk of cloud deployments
  • Trend and predict future cloud costs by hour, day, month, year or any custom time frame

• Right-Size Cloud Capacity
  • Quickly meet dynamic and changing needs to avoid cloud performance and capacity nightmares
  • Track real-time and historical cloud capacity usage
  • Highlight forgotten, zombie and under-utilized cloud resources
  • Quickly identify overloaded and bogged down cloud instances.

uptimeCloud

uptimeCloud is the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. To learn more about uptimeCloud, or to sign up for the uptimeCloud beta, please visit: www.uptimecloud.com

Snapshot analysis

uptime is one of a number of suppliers that are now offering tools to allow users of cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings to track their usage of cloud computing resources and estimate the costs they are incurring. uptime has gone beyond basic accounting and has provided tools to allocate costs in a number of ways.

While uptime's product appears powerful and interesting, it is going to be difficult for the company to help the market become aware of uptime, aware of its products and then get them to be interested enough to inquire about those products. There are much larger companies, such as IBM/Tivoli, HP, BMC and a number of others that are investing heavily in getting their messages out to the market.

Although I can't evaluate the strength of uptimecloud.com without testing it, it appears on the surface to be a powerful tool that would be useful to many organizations that are exploring how cloud computing could be made a useful business tool.