Originally published in Cloud Computing Magazine
Cloud migration has empowered organizations globally to access up-to-date services and benefit from enterprise-grade infrastructure, which has, in turn, proliferated growth for businesses across various industries.
This has seen cloud incorporation become a priority for most enterprises, with McKinsey & Company reporting that most businesses aim to spend 80% of their whole IT hosting budget on the cloud by 2024. But as MSPs rush against competitors to incorporate an increasing number of services and solutions, they run the risk of overprovisioning and wasting resources on unused assets.
Excessive cloud spend is a significant issue for companies. Flexera “2022 State of the Cloud Report” claims that over 30% of cloud spend is wasted, a statistic that will only become more harmful as cloud costs continue to rise, requiring users to outspend their budgets consistently. As a result, cloud cost optimization has become a priority for users of service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, to maximize the business benefits available to them.
Enabling MSPs to operate efficiently is Dublin-based Kalibr8, focused on minimizing cloud optimization complexity while effectively controlling cloud spending. The company has developed the innovative Cloud Optimization Loop, a platform that securely manages company cloud assets to improve the economics and ROI of cloud consumption.
Kalibr8 has a well-defined roadmap to add new cloud platforms, including AWS, Google, and Alibaba clouds. It will also be adding new features for MSPs to leverage to increase the productivity and functionality of the platform, including fraud detection and alerting, power consumption, tracking, alerting, and analytics. Kalibr8 is developing an advanced AI engine that will build extensively upon its proactively to users to lower the costs of customers’ cloud estates.
Entering into a distribution agreement with Kalibr8, leading cloud-first technology distributor Cloud Ready will be deploying and supporting the Kalibr8 platform professionally, with proven expert pre- and post-sale advice, assistance with commercial terms, and complete partner support services for the IT channel across the Pacific region.
“We are forever grateful for the support of the team at Cloud Ready, for their insights during the nearly two-year development process,” said founder and CEO of Kalibr8, Ben McGahon. “It is only by listening to the essential cloud distributors and service providers that any company can truly understand what the end customers need, and in this case, we confirmed that Cloud Confidence was lacking across the digital supply chain. Organizations cannot manage what they cannot measure, and now with this next level of instrumentation and automation, there is transparency on pricing, recommendations for expense reduction, and valuable tools that make it possible to forecast and calibrate cloud investments over time.”
“We are honored to bring this platform and solution to service providers,” said Kelly von der Heyden, Sales Director, Cloud Ready. “The adoption of cloud is skyrocketing across the regions we serve, and being able to offer not just cloud services but the best value for cloud services is tremendously valuable to our business, and by extension, service providers and the organizations who trust them to ensure the best technologies are available to them at the best prices. We look forward to our collective growth and to continuing to influence the ongoing innovation Kalibr8 will bring to all their partners.”
Designed for Managed Service Providers and sold only through the channel, the highly automated Kalibr8 Optimizer Loop platform enables service providers and their customers to optimize investments in cloud services through an advanced, unified portal that works across Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. AWS and GCP modules will be available by the first quarter of 2023, and data automatically harvested from all three hyperscalers will be enriched through orchestration software developed by Kalibr8, presented through an automated, unified portal with an intuitive user experience.
Kalibr8’s platform removes subscription payments that require unnecessary monitoring to ensure underlying costs stay with predefined product categories, instead opting for a straightforward “Pay as you Optimize” model, which utilizes delivery analytics to provide users with a more coherent payment option.
Offering a well-designed user experience through their web-based portal, the model also allows MSPs to quickly and efficiently onboard as many customers as they wish, with scalable onboarding, a “pay only for what you use” approach, with clearly defined benefits showing precisely how much is being spent on cloud consumption and where the spend can be reduced in near real-time.
Alleviating the need for MSPs to worry about conducting manual analyses, The Optimizer Loop drives greater productivity by continually running based on preset defined parameters and policies that dictate its operations without human intervention.
Kalibr8 is continually assessing Microsoft Azure cloud services as they release additional capabilities to manage customer environments more granularly. Kalibr8 aims by Q1 of 2023 to integrate Azure, AWS, and GCP accessible and managed within a unified environment, orchestrating all data into a “single pane of glass” view and experience. Designed from the ground up for MSPs, Kalibr8’s operations, analytics, and reporting features can be configured to any service provider’s specific needs.
