Digital Fuel Enables Full Benefits Of Cloud Computing Through IT Cost Management

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Digital Fuel, the leader in SaaS IT Business Management solutions, today announced the debut of IT Cloud Cost Management, a pioneering, out-of-the-box solution that allows enterprises to take full advantage of emerging cloud computing technologies and services. IT Cloud Cost Management provides an easy way to compare the TCO, unit cost and performance of IT services among different cloud and non-cloud alternatives and vendors, as well as compare to industry benchmarks. Through IT Cloud Cost Management, CIOs, their teams and business units can choose the right alternatives for their business, optimizing the business value of their IT and ongoing control of cost and performance.

"Today's cloud computing landscape is changing the nature of IT by providing many more applicable delivery and pricing alternatives. These alternatives, however, require fast, ongoing business management of IT capabilities based on delivery levels and cost," noted Yisrael Dancziger, President and CEO of Digital Fuel. "Now there are clouds for applications, infrastructure, and business processes. The issue, as clouds become the de facto architecture, is how to track, analyze and assess TCO, unit cost, direct and indirect costs, demand and usage. Furthermore, IT organizations need to know how to allocate the costs of these services to the consumers within their companies."

Digital Fuel's IT Cloud Cost Management solution, which comes as part of its V6.3 platform of business applications, provides a single, unified and out-of-the-box method for managing cost and performance across multiple cloud services, cloud vendors and platforms such as Amazon, Google, Citrix, Cisco Salesforce.com, Rackspace and others. The solution delivers not only proactive IT cost and performance management, but also accurate, usage-based allocation of shared services, internal billing and chargeback, regulatory and tax compliance reporting, IT demand planning, and IT budgeting. It gives organizations the critical visibility requirements necessary to decide among a complex set of cloud computing options by comparing quality and cost of the various options available.

"Cloud Cost Management offers the critical information that allows businesses to accurately plan, budget and gain cost control over their cloud computing spend. This is a discipline that, we believe, will become essential as cloud computing begins to dominate the business world," said Dr. Thomas Mendel Ph.D., Vice President and Research Director of Forrester Research.

Key Capabilities
    * Out-of-the-box integration with usage, performance, billing and cost data from key cloud vendors and platforms such as Amazon, Citrix, Cisco, VMware, Google Apps, Rackspace and many others. Also offers an easy-to-use wizard for quickly integrating with new cloud providers.
    * Templates for comparing TCO, unit cost and performance cross IT services and cloud vendors.
    * A "What-If" analyzer that models costs of IT services including cloud based cost drivers. Allows analysis of different business scenarios, enabling enterprises to chose the most value and cost effective solution for their needs.
    * Reports, dashboards, cost models, benchmarks, and templates that enable easy control and optimization of cloud-based IT environments.
    * Cloud financial compliance for performing usage-based allocation of any shared service, including cloud-based services, in an auditable, systematic, and justifiable manner for tax and regulatory compliance."Cloud computing is bringing disruptive change to the way IT costs and value is managed," added Dancziger. "The ability to quickly activate a new provider, switch vendors, and mix-and-match internal and external assets to provide necessary functions, brings huge promises as well as complexity to the enterprise IT environment. IT Cloud Cost Management makes it simple." For more about Digital Fuel's IT Cloud Cost Management, including a live demo and free workshop, visit here. http://www.digitalfuel.com/solutions/cloud-computing.php.