A free service for businesses to track the usage and costs of public cloud services has been launched by US based technology business management solutions provider Apptio.
Named Apptio Cloud Express, it can be used for a number of cloud offerings including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Azure, and Rackspace.
It makes it possible for users to view their cloud costs as itemised bills, identify aggregate spending and carry out analyses to quantify potential savings from shifting to private or public cloud services. It provides recommendations on potential cost savings of moving from on-demand to reserved instances.
Users have to register their accounts from the third party cloud service providers in Apptio Cloud Express, which then automatically imports billing and usage data.
Decision tool
The company said the data will help companies to make informed decisions on strategies for cloud computing.
Apptio's chief executive officer Sunny Gupta said: "We've captured the emerging best practices for analysing costs and performance across different types of cloud scenarios, and made that information broadly available to our customers. Now, IT leaders can spend less time manually validating data and more time confidently providing answers."
Apptio Cloud Express is based on technology from Apptio's recent acquisition of Raveld, a Seattle based company providing software for companies to measure and optimise the cost and performance of public cloud computing services.