Put It On My Bill

Recently we've been reporting on how hard it is to find out how much cloud services cost. It takes a Columbo to get vendors to crack and confess to their actual prices.

Once you've signed the contracts with all the vendors, you are looking at a lot of pay as you go services -- sort of like your Smartphone bill and you know what a surprise those can be!

OS33thinks it can make cloud bills more predictable. The New York-based company bill itself as an IT-as-a-Service Delivery Platform. I had to admit I had to look this one up -- so I did.

Here's what I learned. IaaSDP (don't worry, they don't use this acronym, I just threw it in here to see how it looks), I Googled IT-as-a-Service Delivery Platform and found many places where OS33 used the term, but no place where they defined it. It seems like a vague term where a cloud provider or managed service provider offers IT services such as management as a service to IT. See, not sure it needs such a fancy name for such a general notion as IT service. What is next, Service as a Service? (Sorry, SaaS is already taken.)

In any event, OS33 has a cool new "unified cloud consumption and billing tool" that pulls all your cloud provider's and your usage and costs into one Web-based console page. This includes not just services, but related software licenses from providers such as Citrix and Microsoft, and application management companies.

Posted by Doug Barney on 04/24/2012 at 12:47 PM