Analytics Slideshow Calculating Cloud ROI

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up.time has Amazon EC2 specific monitoring capabilities built-in, as well as the ability to remotely monitor cloud providers including Rackspace, Terremark and GoGrid. "For companies with infrastructure and using cloud resources, we have an Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Image of our management console program," said Bewley."

In terms of competition, according to Bewley, the established players in this market, which he called "the Big Four" -- HP, CA/Nimsoft, EMC and IBM Tivoli -- are enterprise oriented tools. "Many companies that have been using Open Source tools, and are looking for more reporting, and go with up.time.

"One of our key strengths which resounds well with our SMB base is that we're very easy to use and deploy," said Bewley. "A company can be up in 15 minutes, and we can do an 800-server deployment in three days." Another example of a likely customer scenario, said Bewley, "could be a company with 25 to 50 servers, and probably one IT person. Then someone in the company starts using some Amazon EC2 instances to deploy an application but didn't think about monitoring."

Most up.time customers "expose up.time to their business users, who tend to use services like Salesforce.com," noted Bewley. "This lets them know when a

Other uses for up.time, according to the company, include triggering automated actions to respond to changing workloads, to keep up with capacity demands. Also, according to the company, up.time can be used to determine and prioritize what to migrate to the cloud, based on performance metrics.

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