RightScale, Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud management, today announced General Availability of cloud cost management solution RightScale Optima. RightScale Optima combines existing RightScale analysis, reporting, and forecasting functionality for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM SoftLayer, and private clouds with newly developed collaborative optimization and automated actions to reduce wasted cloud spend.

"Along with our Cloud Gateway network capability, Telstra's Cloud Management Platform powered by RightScale has already transformed how our customers govern and orchestrate their hybrid cloud deployments," said Jim Fagan, Director Global Platforms, Telstra. "Through RightScale Optima, our customers now have the ability to monitor and manage their cloud usage and costs in a deeper and more predictive way. Any resulting cost savings can be re-invested into much needed activities that promote innovation and transformation for their business."

"We see RightScale Optima as a potential difference maker for companies looking to reduce cloud spend," said Edwin Yuen, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "Optimizing cloud spend is not a linear process, with a defined start and a finish. Rather, it is an ongoing, iterative process that involves communication and collaboration between all stakeholders. RightScale, with its experience building their Cloud Management Platform, is uniquely qualified to both help companies develop their costing process and take action to reduce their cloud spend on an ongoing basis."

There are four main components to RightScale Optima:

• Collaborative optimization: RightScale is the first cloud management platform (CMP) to help various resource owners in an enterprise to collaborate to take action on changes to cloud spending.

• Automated action: Targeting inefficient spending, RightScale Optima enables enterprises to take action on insights. The platform is designed to reduce the noise of inaccurate recommendations (a common frustration with some cloud cost management tools).

• Budget and Forecasting: RightScale Optima helps enterprises forecast and predict cloud application costs, track budgets, and develop budget alerts for cost overruns. It also evaluates different clouds, instance types, and purchase options.

• Analysis and reporting: RightScale Optima includes data from all public and private cloud providers and enables organizations to see usage and cost data in a single unified dashboard; view costs by cloud account, team, or application to understand usage trends; perform chargeback and showback; and leverage tags to allocate costs to departments or business units.

Benefits of RightScale Optima include:

• 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 deliver optimization recommendations to resource owners.

• Noise reduction: Enable resource owners to tag recommendations that should be ignored and prevent future alerts.

• Automated action: Enable users to take action on recommendations with ongoing policy-based automation.

"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," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "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. We believe RightScale Optima is a major step forward for large enterprises looking to manage cloud spend."