Nutanix Beam – Nutanix’s first SaaS offering – uses technology from their Minjar acquisition to help customers predict and control cloud costs, as well as better track resources and adhere to compliance regulations.
NEW ORLEANS – Cloud pricing in a multi-cloud universe is a complex swamp, that is a major obstacle to a pleasurable customer experience in the enterprise cloud. To deal with this issue, today at their .NEXT customer event, Nutanix is announcing Nutanix Beam, a new software-as-a-service [SaaS] offering that lets customers manage their spending, security and regulatory compliance across nearly any cloud platform.
“This is our first SaaS service, which is very exciting for the team here,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product Marketing.
“Many organizations who have already made the leap into public cloud structures have been unpleasantly surprised to learn that the costs are much higher than what they expected,” Smith said. Managing costs in third party environments that they do not control is complex even without this difficulty.
“Nutanix Beam addresses these issues by enabling more accurate resource planning,” Smith said. “Beam provides deep visibility and detailed analytics to show customers how they are using public clouds. This allows them to identify things like Zombie VMs, which consume resources, but which are not turned on. It provides one-click cost optimization, and will also make recommendations for customers to reduce the costs of their cloud environments.”
Being able to help customers simplify and control their pricing is critical in order to give them the kind of experience in the cloud that they have learned to demand from consumer experiences with companies like Amazon and Apple, said Sudheesh Nair, Nutanix’s President.
“In a multi-cloud world, all the pricing for things is different, and it is very complex,” Nair said. “We needed to simplify the pricing for multi-cloud, and that is how Beam will play a big part.”
In addition, the enhanced visibility facilitates better financial governance, allowing IT departments to track the consumption of cloud resources by department and group and enforce policies based on allocated budgets. It also assists with regulatory compliance, by letting customers define custom health check policies for compliance audits, and proactively analyze cloud security operations.
“It provides a single pane view of the public cloud, and shows how can deliver visibility across services,” said Vijay Rayapati, GM, Engineering at Nutanix. “It determines the right machine for the right workload, and provides the next level of visibility across PCI, HIPAA and CIS.”
The Beam technology comes from Nutanix’s recent acquisition of Minjar Botmetic service, which has already been deployed to manage more than a billion dollars of cloud spend across both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Nutanix Beam is Nutanix’s first SaaS service, but Smith indicated that it is unlikely to be the last.
“We do intend to expand in this area, but are not able to provide any specific additional information at this time,” he said.
Nutanix Beam is available now.
