Originally published on MSP Today

Advanced Virtual Machine Solutions (AVMS) this week came out of development mode and emerged as a provocative new brand now known as Kalibr8. It is a contender in the growing field of cloud optimization platforms with a cloud-native and channel-only approach to helping MSPs operate more profitably and bring more value to their customers.

The company, based in Dublin, also appointed a new Board made up of global tech industry veterans and seed investors while unveiling plans to deepen and broaden its Cloud Optimization as a Service (COaaS) offering, which is being sold exclusively through channels. The service is aimed in part at the SMBs and SMEs the growing world of MSPs is serving.

Kalibr8’s new platform provides an automated cloud optimization and cost management platform with an intuitive and efficient single pane of glass view into all aspects that impact getting the most value for the least cost across the three most popular cloud providers – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Its Optimizer Loop platform today securely manages Microsoft Azure assets with a goal to continually improve the economics and ROI of cloud consumption. 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.

Azure, AWS, and CGP offer businesses, government agencies, non-profits, and companies of all sizes next-level performance without the complexity of managing a corporate data center, along with the ability to scale up as those organizations grow and increasingly move their computing and communications to public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud models.

Over the coming years, organizations will want to operate across multiple clouds, and multiple data centers, given the multitude of benefits, cloud computing, and communications deliver, including the support of digital transformation, innovation, distributed and remote workforces, increasingly sophisticated cloud-native business applications, and more.

“The big challenge lies in reconciling a complex ecosystem of physical and virtual platforms, with full transparency into the related economics as cloud offerings, pricing, policies, and business models morph within the highly competitive cloud services market,” said Founder, Managing Director, and CEO Ben McGahon, who has decades of experience in the MSP industry. “There has been a dramatic shift over the last ten years in how cloud services and cloud-based offerings are discovered, procured, and managed – or mismanaged. MSPs and their customers have learned the hard way about how cloud-related expenses can skyrocket. Our mission is to bring next-level transparency and control to MSPs with the most automated, intelligent, and unified cloud management platform in the market.”

Kalibr8’s platform has a commercial model that is straightforward, based on delivery analytics, with a pay-as-you-optimize model. The solution also includes no blanket percent of subscription, cumbersome resources, and instance- or subscription-based pricing that requires constant monitoring to ensure underlying costs stay with predefined product categories.

Kalibr8’s platform can help MSPs understand a VM’s usage pattern and make more accurate decisions as to when each scaling or schedule group must be available to users. MSPs can also easily see savings from scheduling and scaling VMs and cost usage in dollars and cents over a defined billing period, as well as build, view, and understand over time  VM costs versus specification and requirements against each VM’s intended use.

For SMBs, there is an ever-increasing number of applications and tools they must find, learn, certify, deploy, and untimely manage to deliver services effectively to their customers. MSPs can help combat these hurdles for SMBs with Kalibr8’s platform through:

• A centralized portal to leverage more advanced management capabilities over time. These include horizontal scaling, power consumption savings, cloud insights, trends, and usage data.
• A single view across multiple clouds with data on cost, power consumption, and overall optimization to ensure customer cloud assets are being adequately tracked with automated management and scheduling.
• Automated scheduling capability and automated scaling capability to optimize 24/7 resources to ensure customers are only paying for peak use when peak use is necessary.
• Analysis of cloud tenants to help ascertain the behaviors and characteristics of each customer cloud instance.

“Our platform makes it easy for MSPs to collaborate with their customers to maximize budgets and confidence in their cloud operating expenses, and to clearly understand costs and savings by resources, group, subscription or tenant,” McGahon said.

Kalibr8 is continually assessing Microsoft Azure cloud services; they release further capabilities to manage customer environments to a more granular level. 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.