Cloud Management Solutions

As Cloud software solutions continue to gain acceptance and market share, corporate Information Technology (IT) teams are being tasked with utilizing Cloud solutions to provide greater IT infrastructure flexibility, while at the same time reducing costs and decreasing the time to provision new solutions. Cloud Management Platform (CMP) software systems have been created to manage both public and private Cloud platforms, increasing IT efficiency in the organization.  CMP’s not only help technology teams; they can also offer end users some degree of self service provisioning via service catalogs. Another feature found in many, if not most CMP’s is the ability to provide configurable billing and charge back service metrics.

There are two general categories of CMP applications: 1) those that were originally designed for management of software development using public cloud resources, and 2) those that were originally developed to manage internal infrastructure for private clouds. CMP vendors from both sides have now developed new functionality to cross over and manage both scenarios in hybrid cloud environments.

The CMP software market is currently in a state of significant flux. There are many small vendors building CMP platforms that are trying to grow market share. Larger vendors such as Cisco, IBM, Red Hat, and VMware have been purchasing many of these smaller vendors to quickly add hybrid cloud management capability to their application portfolios. At the same time, another large vendor (Citrix) has recently announced that it is divesting from the CMP market by selling their Cloud Portal Business Manager product. This all adds up to an unstable CMP vendor market landscape.

If you are an IT professional looking for ways to streamline your Cloud management environments, or maybe a CFO or Finance Director struggling with Cloud cost allocations, perhaps a Cloud Management Platform is just what you’re looking for!