Cloudyn brings its cost management tools to Google’s cloud

The Google Compute Engine (GCE) is still a new product on the public cloud market. But it’s already picking up advocates.

“From an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) perspective, we feel that Google has a stronger strategy, deep pockets, infrastructure, and vision than any other player that can compete with [public cloud leader] Amazon Web Services (AWS),” Sharon Wagner, chief executive of cloud cost-management company Cloudyn, said in an interview with VentureBeat.

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For almost a year now, Wagner’s company has been charging companies to show them the most cost-effective way to run their applications on Amazon’s cloud. And now the company monitors about 7 percent of all of AWS capacity worldwide, Wagner said. It’s reasonable to focus on the clear leader in the public cloud business, but now that Wagner is hearing a fair number of his customers show interest in running on Google’s IaaS product, he’s taking the Google product more seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that starting today, his company is making the Cloudyn tools available for use on the Google Compute Engine and adding capabilities to manage deployments across Google and Amazon’s clouds.

The addition of Google is significant; it’s just the second public cloud Cloudyn supports now.

That’s a big bet on a young public cloud. Google Compute Engine became generally available in early December. The Google Compute Engine website carries just two case studies of organizations using the product. AWS, by comparison, has too many to count. Indeed, the most primitive Amazon cloud services — S3 for object storage and EC2 for slices of physical servers — have been around since 2006.

Still, many in the cloud community believe Google is one of the few companies that can go head to head with Amazon in the public cloud industry. And Wagner certainly appears to stand alongside those Google cloud believers.

“We do have very accurate statistics on customer spend and usage of AWS,” Wagner said. “We believe that the distribution in terms of big organizations and how much money they spend on GCE — I believe it’s going to be more or less the same (as AWS), because what I see right now is that the Google sales team is after the same opportunities that Amazon is after, and they’re also trying to move customers from AWS into Google Compute Engine.”

Wagner is less interested in supporting IBM’s cloud now because of Big Blue’s more direct and drawn-out sales process. Rackspace, another cloud provider, isn’t ideal because Wagner isn’t sure how many applications are running on Rackspace’s cloud, as opposed to its hosted infrastructure. And support for Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud is less of a priority because Wagner isn’t sure if Microsoft will introduce a cloud management tool after its acquisition of monitoring startup MetricsHub last year. So Google it is.

If Wagner’s hunch about Google’s prospects proves to be on target, it would mean Google could grow substantially faster than Amazon did. Some cloud commentators have suggested Google has the luxury of learning from and avoiding the mistakes of other public clouds. If that’s true, and many companies flock to it, Cloudyn’s gamble could pay off.

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