RightScale Enhances Cloud Forecasting With PlanForCloud

RightScale, a provider of cloud management software, today announced the acquisition of ShopForCloud, a free tool to help enterprise users model cloud architectures and usage patterns. The free service, which will be rebranded as PlanForCloud, provides  up-to-date pricing from a variety of cloud providers, allowing users to produce detailed cost reports quickly.

RightScale, which is privately held, declined to provide the purchase price. The Scotland-based ShopForCloud team will become part of RightScale in a newly opened office in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since RightScale has a relationship with the University of St. Andrews, the acquisition gives them a critical mass to continue to grow a European presence in the "Silicon Glen" in the future.

As more companies prepare for cloud deployments and many are using multiple cloud providers, pricing the cost of cloud services is an increasingly necessary service. With up-to-date prices from major cloud providers – including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace – the PlanForCloud tool lets users forecast costs on any supported cloud, save the forecasts, and later update them as cloud prices fluctuate. Enterprises can perform a simulation of their deployment and generate reports to accurately budget in the future.

The Importance of Cloud Forecasting

“When we launched PlanForCloud, it was clear that businesses needed tools to help forecast their cloud costs across the constantly expanding list of cloud providers,” said Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-Founder of PlanForCloud. “As cloud usage grows and becomes a larger part of corporate IT budgets, our service provides the tools businesses need to improve the visibility and predictability of their cloud computing initiatives.”

“Knowing the cost of cloud services is critical whether companies are making their first foray into cloud computing, planning to deploy additional resources or managing their overall budget for cloud spending,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “With our cloud management customers, we have seen firsthand that they need a better way to forecast cloud costs in order to predict spending and choose the right cloud strategies and providers."

Since 2006, RightScale has enabled organizations to easily deploy and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds, providing efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications.

Modeling Cloud Deployments and Their Cost

PlanForCloud enables modeling of the components of cloud deployments, including servers, storage, database and data transfer, as well as usage scenarios that incorporate growth, seasonality and other variability in the consumption of cloud resources.

PlanForCloud will remain free to any online users and can be used by any business to forecast clouds costs, including those that are not currently RightScale customers or users of cloud services.  No cloud provider accounts or current cloud deployments are required to use the site or calculate cloud costs.

In other news, Logica and RightScale recently announced that they will support hybrid cloud implementations running across Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud and enterprise private clouds.  This environment will include RightScale cloud management technologies.