Is the next battle in the Cloud Price War going to end up in your datacenter?

Why you need billing and chargeback for Openstack and what to expect from Red Hat and Talligent.

There is a cloud price war going on and the impact is felt across all IT service delivery, public and private.  The big players such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Centurylink, have all recently announced dramatically lower prices and new functionality. Market pundits expect that these announcements are just the beginning of falling prices as cloud providers move to take advantage of the massive shift of IT services to the cloud and work to grab market share.

The commoditization of cloud services provides great benefits to the IT consumer by providing lower overall costs and more differentiated PaaS and SaaS type offerings.  Managed service providers can pass along cost savings to their customers, make additional margin on their services, and avoid the large capital investment in hardware that was previously required to provide solutions to their customers.  Enterprise users can more quickly iterate products and solutions by spinning up new dev and Q&A environments in the cloud without time consuming internal IT requests.

To the IT director, the commoditization of cloud services means something completely different.  It raises difficult questions such as “how do my cloud costs compare with AWS?” and “how do I efficiently use IT resources while providing on-demand services to my customers?”   Service providers have to maintain peak utilization, be smart about capacity planning, and add differentiated features to effectively compete with the big cloud players.

Owen Rogers of the 451 Research studies the economics of cloud and has said “Small changes in capacity planning accuracy can have a big impact on cost-efficiency”[1].  It is important to understand the key metrics that drive your cost recovery and capacity planning.  For a quick view of how server utilization affects your competitiveness, please click here[2].

IT managers need new tools and insights, as well as trusted partners, to keep up with the rapidly evolving cloud market.  Where can IT managers turn?

• OpenStack is a powerful and low cost alternative to proprietary cloud solutions, making it an attractive solution for service providers.  More importantly, the OpenStack community is innovating faster than many other cloud platforms.  Major releases of Openstack are generally available every 6 months.

• Openstack represents the collective effort of over 9,500 individual members from 100 countries and 850 different organizations.  Leading technology vendors such as Dell, IBM, and Cisco have all endorsed Openstack as a key cloud initiative for their business.

• Talligent OpenBook provides the ability for service providers to monetize their investments in OpenStack clouds with an easy to deploy, flexible solution.  Users can keep pace with the market by quickly adding, pricing, and tracking new services for their customers.  Talligent allows enterprise users to support internal chargeback or show back reporting to encourage efficient use of corporate resources.

• Talligent has been closely connected to the Openstack community for the last 18 months and has contributed to the development of the Ceilometer Telemetry component.

• Once you have decided on the Openstack platform, you need a vendor that understands the technology and how the components fit.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is an enterprise product  with an extended multiyear lifecycle.  In addition, Red Hat has the industry’s largest OpenStack partner ecosystem, helping to ensure interoperability across the various components in your cloud stack.

Whether you are contemplating a private, public or hybrid cloud solution, a strong partnership ecosystem is here to provide you with the information you need to make the right decisions.

About Talligent
As the first billing and customer lifecycle solution purpose-built for Openstack clouds, Talligent has led the way in helping service provider and enterprise customers track usage and provide detailed cost accounting for cloud tenants. Talligent has contributed to the ongoing development and roadmap for Ceilometer Telemetry, the metering component of OpenStack, and clearly understands the requirements of users deploying Openstack clouds.  As the central knowledgebase for Openstack deployments, OpenBook is designed to support key billing, chargeback, and reporting requirements for an efficient Openstack cloud deployment.

OpenBook v2.0 will be on display in booth #E25 during the OpenStack Summit, across the aisle from DaaS partner Virtual Bridges (booth E33).  Sanjay Mishra, CTO, will present key aspects of v2.0 in the Demo Theater on Wednesday, May 14 at 12pm.

1. http://cloud-economics.com/post/83529255371/click-the-image-for-an-animation-of-cost-v
2. “Comparing public and private clouds is like apples and oranges”, Owens Rogers,William Fellows, 25 November 2013 (https://451research.com/report-short?entityId=79437)