Ostrato and Carnegie Mellon University Team to Advance Cloud Management Technology

Ostrato today announced that it collaborated with a team of students in the Master of Information Systems Management (MISM) program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College this spring to enhance cloudSM’s billing and reporting capabilities.

The explosion of cloud usage has become a cost and management nightmare for thousands of businesses that lack the manpower or expertise to control their cloud costs and usage (or “sprawl”). This problem is exacerbated by the complexity of billing reports from cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which makes it difficult for companies to track and allocate their spending, let alone manage it.

For its capstone project, the Carnegie Mellon team analyzed the bill extraction process for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine; performed a competitive analysis; and identified and customized billing reports for different classes of cloudSM users, as well as different customer types.

“We enlisted the help of our CMU capstone team to help augment our product management,” said Dale Wickizer, Ostrato CTO. “They were able to combine their own experience in analytics, along with information they gleaned from competitive analysis and research about cloud service provider capabilities/limitations in billing, to synthesize user stories that are going to greatly enhance the cost reporting in our platform.”

Customers reviewed the user stories that the team completed, and they were pleased with the results. The capstone team then incorporated those stories into the platform, which is currently supporting real-time customer challenges by providing better visibility and control of cost, usage, and billing data.

The project team consisted of Amrit Tandon, who served as the scrum master and project manager, Rachita Issar, who led the documentation effort, Chandrasekhar Iyer, the AWS lead, and Sri Keerthi Mady, the Azure team lead.

The MISM program focuses on providing students with an integrated study of how technology interacts with business processes, strategy, and policy. As part of this program, students learn from seasoned practitioners, like those at Ostrato, to prepare them to lead enterprises in a fiercely competitive global marketplace. Thus, the team chose to use a real-world agile development process for the project, working in two-week sprints with a daily scrum.

Ostrato thanks Jon Nehlsen and the H. John Heinz III College at Carnegie Mellon University, faculty sponsor John Davis, and this great team of students for a job well-done.

In addition to cost visibility and management, cloudSM helps enterprises with all facets of controlling the cloud: self-service orchestration across public and private cloud providers, user governance, and enterprise integration to improve workflow and automation.

About Ostrato

Ostrato’s cloudSM platform helps companies save time and money managing their complex and fast-growing applications and services in the cloud. cloudSM provides enterprises the visibility and control they need to optimize spend, reduce costs and govern user access across AWS, Azure, VMware, OpenStack and other providers. We do this by providing IT and DevOps with an integrated, self-service platform for provisioning and automating all public, private and hybrid cloud services. In addition, managed service providers (MSPs) can use cloudSM to create new revenue streams, differentiate their offerings and drive down internal costs to meet their customers’ growing demand for cloud consumption. Visit www.ostrato.com to learn more.