Densify update helps finance make more intelligent cloud buying decisions

Densify has been a company that helps engineers buy cloud resources in a cost-effective way, but the company wanted to show this this cloud spending data to finance as well. This week it announced a new product called Cloud Cost Intelligence (CCI), which has been designed to give finance teams greater visibility into a company's cloud spend.

Densify CEO Gerry Smith says that the new product aims to bring the customer's understanding of cloud spend to the part of the business that actually pays the bills. "What we've done is we've advanced our product, so that the same intelligence that the engineer uses [to select cloud resources], is now available on the finance side of the house," Smith told TechCrunch.

He says they found that at many customers, there is a disconnect between the engineers who are buying the resources and the finance team, who is responsible for paying the bill. Ultimately, they need to understand what they are buying, so they can give engineering what they need without overpaying for the required resources.

Screenshot: Densify

Smith explained that often what happens is that finance is charged with negotiating with the cloud vendors without any real knowledge of the engineering requirements. For example, if an engineering team buys a certain type of configuration on a regular basis, the finance team can see this in CCI and maybe get a better price on that by promising to buy a certain amount of those configurations, or they could find that there is updated configuration available that provides a similar set of resources for a lower cost, something engineering may not be aware of.

"CCI allows the finance person to do a better job than just looking at a bill. He or she can now understand the choices and alternatives and why one is better than the other. So It allows the finance person to do more than just allocate costs. It allows them to add value to the engineer, so that they can buy [more cost-effective] reserved instances, for example," Smith explained.

Densify is based near Toronto in Canada and has raised $38.2 million, according to Crunchbase. The company actually began life back in 1999 as Cirba. Originally, it provided data center analytics solutions for storage supply and demand "Their first optimization product was Densify. They ended up rebranding the company and focusing solely on optimization in 2017," a company spokesperson explained.

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