RightScale Announces Optima, A New Product for Collaborative Cloud Cost Management and Optimization

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud management, today announced RightScale Optima, a new standalone collaborative cloud cost management and optimization solution, which leverages RightScale’s decade of experience in multi-cloud management and automation. RightScale Optima streamlines collaboration across the enterprise by delivering cost-saving recommendations to the appropriate resource owners, enabling those resource owners to take automated actions, and tracking optimization progress across the entire organization.

"Because cloud use in the enterprise is decentralized, the biggest challenge in reducing cloud costs is the need for tight collaboration between cloud governance teams and the teams that own the cloud resources," said Torsten Volk, managing research director at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "EMA research shows that organizations are aware of this requirement, with organizations identifying "Collaboration" as the most significant area for cost savings."

"RightScale Optima is the first cloud expense solution designed as a collaborative platform that integrates cost-saving recommendations and automated action with extensive cost reporting to help enterprises ensure that they can realize savings opportunities," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "Our decade of experience with multi-cloud management and automation has enabled us to design a unique solution to streamline and automate cloud cost optimization."

RightScale Optima Brings Collaborative Optimization to Cloud Expense Management
Built on the foundation of RightScale’s existing cost analysis, reporting, and forecasting capabilities, RightScale Optima adds innovative new capabilities that help organizations identify waste through cost-saving recommendations; streamline collaboration between different stakeholders; and implement changes through automated action.

RightScale Optima provides:

• Quick ROI: Get smart cost optimization recommendations across clouds and cloud accounts that identify instant savings opportunities for each resource and team across the enterprise.
• Collaboration: Automatically assign optimization recommendations to resource owners and deliver tailored alerts and reports.
• Noise-reduction: Enable resource owners to tag recommendations that should be ignored and prevent future alerts.
• Automated action: Enable push-button execution of recommendations by resource owners and ongoing policy-based automation.
• Enterprise-wide coordination: Track progress on implementing optimization recommendations at the team or enterprise level.

RightScale Optima will be available as a standalone product and it will also be included as part of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform that includes existing capabilities for self-service cloud provisioning, governance, cloud analytics, and cloud orchestration and management.

RightScale Optima is available in Early Access.

Growth of Enterprise Cost Management Strategies
IT professionals increasingly view cost management as a critical area of focus. According to Gartner in the August 12, 2016 report, Innovation Insight for Cloud Service Expense Management Tools, "Public cloud IaaS consumption and spending continue to grow. I&O leaders responsible for IaaS spending need to get ahead of spending and waste through the emerging practice of cloud service expense management, and to take advantage of the emerging tools."

In addition, the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals found that optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative among all cloud users. Respondents estimate 30 percent of cloud spend is wasted, while RightScale has measured actual waste between 30 and 45 percent. Despite an increased focus on cloud cost management, only a minority of companies are taking critical actions to optimize cloud costs, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost clouds or regions.

Biggest Areas of Focus to Save Money
Over the past year, RightScale professional services experts have been working with enterprises to optimize costs through the RightScale Cost Optimization Service. In doing so, the company continues to compile statistics that illustrate just how much cloud spend is wasted and where that waste can be found.

Although this data is an average of dozens of customers that RightScale has helped to optimize costs, it is representative of what the company sees across most cloud users. On average, RightScale saw that 32 percent of cloud spend was wasted.

The biggest ways companies can save money and the average amount companies can save:

• Add schedules on developer instances: 13%
• Improve utilization 11%
• Add end dates on developer instances 8%
• Delete unattached volumes 7%
• Purchase AWS Reserved Instances or Google Commited Use Discounts 6%
• Delete old snapshots 4%