Virtana
Radically Simple Hybrid Cloud Transformation for Optimizing Performance, Capacity, and Cost

Recently, as companies have recognized the need to initiate change, many have pushed digital transformation to the forefront of their strategic initiatives—often accelerating its planned adoption by several years. To this end, cloud adoption has become an integral part of such initiatives, as it brings new capabilities for companies to market, innovate, and scale quickly, easily, and efficiently. But this voyage to the cloud demands a new level of applications and systems observability, the absence of which can cause numerous complications post-cloud migration. These include siloed views of infrastructure, traffic issues, automation issues, performance degradation, and lack of consistent optimization of applications and networks in the cloud.

Enter Virtana.

Virtana provides a single AI-powered SaaS platform that leverages high-definition precision data insights to enable IT customers to monitor, manage, and optimize any workload on any cloud. The company aims to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation with its robust software platform. It manages the entire organizational IT infrastructure across on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments with AIOps, machine learning (ML), and data-driven analyticspowered tools. “Our SaaS platform follows a know-beforeyou-go approach to provide users with intelligent insights into their workloads,” says Randy Randhawa, SVP of Engineering for Virtana. “We provide a holistic view through a single platform that lets people simply manage the costs, capacity, performance, as well as availability of applications.”

In an interaction with CIO Applications Magazine, Randhawa talks about how Virtana is helping businesses drive digital transformation in their business and have visibility into how their infrastructures are performing.

How do you think Virtana is supporting digital transformation for its clients?

Digital transformation is not a one-and-done process. It’s a continuous journey for enterprises to undertake to solve business problems and achieve success. These initiatives demand constant change. Being a remote-first company, we have first-hand experience in undergoing the transformation ourselves and dealing with the journey to the cloud. Our products help clients make well-informed decisions and assist them in undergoing the change. We address this disruption by providing them with data and insights across public, private, or hybrid environments.

Please walk us through the digital solutions you provide to help your clients attain success, along with a couple of success stories.

Developing Cloud Native applications involves provisioning compute, storage, and other resources; composed together to deliver a service.

It is not uncommon to go through iterations of setting up and tearing down resources as needed. But what they don’t realize is that, unlike some traditional enterprise data centers, storage is a separate component in a public cloud. The allocated storage keeps on running and adds to the company’s expenses even if they shut down the virtual machines and containers.

Our product, Virtana Optimize, resolves this issue by leveraging automation. It gives insight into the cloud bills and reveals where resources are being spent. In addition, the solution immediately notifies the team about any discrepancy it finds in the statements.

One of our clients is Software Solutions Integrated (SSI), an agribusiness company based out of Illinois. Recently, by incorporating Virtana Optimize and taking advantage of our rightsizing recommendations, SSI saved 12 percent in their monthly cloud spending. When seen against the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of expenses in a given month, the saving is extensive! SSI is leveraging Virtana Optimize to essentially control their costs in the public cloud as an ongoing cost management tool.

Another client is AUCloud, Australia’s sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider who exclusively focuses on Government (Federal, State, and Local) and critical National Industry communities. They leverage our VirtualWisdom on-premises product with their comprehensive private cloud that houses several technologies— from VMware to Cisco to pure and cloud-based storage. The solution enables AUCloud to supervise the overall environment capacity and make decisions regarding their VMs, including optimal placement, whether they are over or under-provisioned, and so on.

We have another product, Virtana Migrate, which provides insights regarding whether applications or workloads should be moved from a private to a public cloud and which cloud is best suited to the requirement. A good example would be Computer Services, Inc. (CSI), an IT service management company. They leveraged Virtana Migrate with our cloud migration assessment service to differentiate which workloads they should move and which to leave as is, on-premises. They realized that the public cloud did not best suit some of their resources due to the specific storage requirements or SLAs that they have for their customers. Sometimes remaining on-premises and not moving to the cloud is the right decision.

What do you think differentiates Virtana from its competitors?

What differentiates us in the market is the fact that we are experts in AIOps. We can provide a number of tools to our customers on a single platform. We understand that our clients want to offer the best-level services to their end-users. Accordingly, we simplify the process involved and upscale data to enable them to make informed decisions on how to serve their customers best. In addition, we bring together the capability of optimizing and managing workloads, migration assessments, and automation all in one platform. This empowers clients to ensure their infrastructure aligns with business objectives.

What does the future look like for Virtana?

We’re continually looking at the market and addressing our clients’ needs to develop new features and capabilities. As enterprises migrate to public cloud environments, they still want the same visibility and change control management over the environment, just as they had in the private cloud. We’re excited to support this space of comprehensive change control management through Virtana Optimize in the near future.

We’re also continuously growing our coverage for different public clouds. We currently support AWS and Azure but will soon be functional on Google Cloud Platform. Our company is adding additional capabilities to monitor more and more public, private, and hybrid infrastructures. Also, we’re actively recruiting new talent across the company to add many more chapters to our book of success.