Digital Fuel Offers IT Cost Management Solution

Digital Fuel, a provider of SAAS IT business management solutions, announced the debut of IT Cloud Cost Management, which helps provide small to medium-size businesses with a way to compare the total cost of ownership, unit cost and performance of IT services of different cloud and non-cloud alternatives and vendors, as well as compare them to industry benchmarks.

The solution, which comes as part of the company's V6.3 platform of business applications, provides a single, unified and out-of-the-box method for managing cost and performance across multiple cloud services, cloud vendors and platforms such as Amazon, Google, Citrix, Cisco Salesforce.com, Rackspace and others. Cloud Cost Management delivers not only proactive IT cost and performance management, but also usage-based allocation of shared services, internal billing and chargeback, regulatory and tax compliance reporting, IT demand planning, and IT budgeting.

"Today's cloud computing landscape is changing the nature of IT by providing many more applicable delivery and pricing alternatives. These alternatives, however, require fast, ongoing business management of IT capabilities based on delivery levels and cost," said Yisrael Dancziger, president and CEO of Digital Fuel. "Now there are clouds for applications, infrastructure and business processes. The issue, as clouds become the de facto architecture, is how to track, analyze and assess TCO, unit cost, direct and indirect costs, demand, and usage. Furthermore, IT organizations need to know how to allocate the costs of these services to the consumers within their companies."

Features include templates for comparing TCO, unit cost and performance across IT services and cloud vendors; and a "What-If" analyzer that models costs of IT services including cloud-based cost drivers and allows analysis of different business scenarios, reports, dashboards, cost models, benchmarks, and templates that enable control and optimization of cloud-based IT environments and cloud financial compliance for performing usage-based allocation of any shared service, including cloud-based services, in an auditable, systematic and justifiable manner for tax and regulatory compliance.

"Cloud computing is bringing disruptive change to the way IT costs and value is managed," said Dancziger. "The ability to quickly activate a new provider, switch vendors, and mix-and-match internal and external assets to provide necessary functions brings huge promises as well as complexity to the enterprise IT environment. IT Cloud Cost Management makes it simple."