Newvem launches new Windows Azure cloud-management tools to help enterprises act like startups

Cloud-optimization and analytics service Newvem has expanded its offerings to Windows Azure from Amazon Cloud in a new push to make enterprises as nimble as startups — and to make computing resources outside the bricks-and-mortar as manageable as those inside.

“Enterprises’ need for public cloud is much different than startups,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday. “Azure is exactly the perfect extension of the data center.”

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Newvem is well-known for its Amazon Web Services offerings, offering startups optimization services, security checking, and overall cloud management — including the first-ever iPhone app for managing your cloud services. Now, Laderman said, the company is returning to its roots in enterprise with a similar offering for Azure. It’s the fruit of an 8-month effort, and it’s a signal that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are hitting a needed an lucrative market niche in a way that Amazon is not.

“Azure is a billion-dollar business,” Laderman says. “Azure is Microsoft’s best-kept secret in the enterprise.”

Newvem’s new offerings on Azure include visualization of your cloud costs, inventory, and usage trends, methods to create dynamic views of your cloud usage and align them to business objectives for very granular optimization recommendations, and pattern-recognizing tools that identify and highlight consumption patterns, such as regular peaks, bursts, and trends.

Private beta participant Linkury agrees, saying that Newvem for Azure gave the company “visibility into specific Windows Azure inventory that we use,” and that “it’s a great time-saver and has helped us to better plan and forecast our usage.”

The lure of Azure, according to Newvem, is that Microsoft is already huge in the enterprise, and corporations can seamlessly move workloads between owned servers and cloud servers as required. So a company that begins a speculative new project can start serving its computing needs on Azure and then, once workloads stabilize, move the workload into the corporate data center.

That helps enterprises be as nimble and quick to market as startups, since projects can begin immediately without the need for purchase, installation, and configuration of owned hardware and software solutions. But it also enables enterprises to manage costs effectively. If the project isn’t successful, there’s no unused hardware left lying around. If it is, and if via Newvem’s optimization offerings IT management determines that costs could be lower in the data center, projects can easily be moved back inside the four walls.

To Laderman, that’s a key differentiator between Amazon and Azure.

“That’s important for Microsoft,” he says. “They win both ways, because they’re both in the cloud and in the enterprise.”

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Microsoft is very “partner-centric” and has been a key supporter during the 8-month project, Laderman says, especially Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Newvem in its enterprise marketing channels, will put Newvem’s solution in the Azure store, and will help Newvem go to market via joint sales efforts … all indicators of Microsoft’s commitment to deploying its cloud solutions in the enterprise, and partnering with companies who have complementary services.