Cloud management player RightScale lays off 10 percent of its staff

RightScale, a company with software for helping companies track and adjust the cloud computing resources they consume from multiple cloud providers, has cut 10 percent of its workforce, a spokesman confirmed to VentureBeat today.

The move, which RightScale implemented on Friday, is intended to help the company focus more on adding big companies as customers, chief executive Michael Crandell said via email. Not that the company is having a hard time reaching the enterprise market, though.

“In the most recent quarter we added a number of enterprise customers that spanned a diverse set of industries, including, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and technology,” Crandell wrote. Customers include Comcast, HTC, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Rovio, Sony Music, and Splunk, according to RightScale’s website.

Still, layoffs don’t bode well for the company, which would not say exactly how many employees it let go.

The cuts probably have something to do with the fact that competition in the growing cloud-computing business is heating up for pretty much any product or service you can think of. The providers of raw cloud infrastructure, like Amazon Web Services and IBM, have resorted to price wars, geographical expansion, and research on nifty features as of late, which might make it difficult for a new player to come in and grow quickly.

Meanwhile, other competitors besides RightScale are vying for the business of companies that want to manage all of their cloud usage. Dell certainly is, for one. So is Cliqr.

Optimizing the use of money for cloud computing is especially hot, with companies like Cloudability and Cloudyn boasting about how many deployments they manage on AWS. In November, Rightscale announced the limited beta release for a tool of its own to keep an eye on the costs of cloud deployments. That tool will become generally available in the second quarter of this year, Cradell wrote.

RightScale last disclosed a round of venture funding — $15.6 million — in February 2013. Another round of funding for RightScale could help the company grow further. Or perhaps an acquisition could be on the way.