Vega Cloud is bringing generative AI capabilities to the platform it offers to help enterprises keep better tabs on how they spend their money for cloud services.
The company on Thursday unveiled Cosmoo, one in a number of updates Vega Cloud is making to its Enterprise FinOps platform. Cosmoo is an AI-powered chatbot that IT teams can interact with to help them streamline financial operations, get more insights into their multicloud spend, and make better informed decisions.
The tool, which was announced at the FinOps X 2024 show in San Diego, also will automatically churn out data analyses, manage budgets, track expenses, generate reports, and create real-time alerts.
“Enterprises can leverage Cosmoo’s advanced capabilities to identify cost-saving opportunities, forecast expenditures, and optimize resource allocation, all in real time,” Brent Clements, vice president of product and engineering at Vega Cloud, told Techstrong.ai. “One of the most significant benefits Cosmoo brings is the ability to generate dynamic, real-time views of data. This means enterprises can swiftly adapt to changing conditions, proactively address financial anomalies, and maintain a clear, strategic overview of their cloud investments.”
Vega Cloud, founded in 2018, has built a cloud-based platform that aims to help organizations manage their cloud spending, a continuing problem for enterprises as they move more of their business operations and data into their increasingly multicloud environments.
AI Adds to Cloud Spending Challenges
Controlling cloud spending is an ongoing issue for enterprises. According to Flexera’s latest State of the Cloud report, 89% of organizations have multicloud environments and 59% said cloud cost optimization was their top priority. Market research firm Statista found that about 84% of respondents to a survey said managing cloud expenses is a significant challenge.
It promises to get more challenging. The rapid adoption of generative AI adoption – and to some extent continued application modernization — will grow global end-user spending on public cloud services to $675 billion this year, a 20.4% jump over 2023, according to Gartner analysts. Such growth will continue, according to analyst Sid Nag, who said it could grow such spending to more than $1 trillion before the end of the decade.
Flexera researchers said this won’t make things easier for enterprises.
“In the face of ongoing economic uncertainties, many organizations are investing in transformative initiatives such as generative AI (GenAI) and sustainability,” they wrote. “At the same time, managing costs effectively remains a top priority – and trying to find a balance between the two is a formidable challenge.”
Still while cloud use continues to grow, wasted spend is decreasing, in part due to an “intensified focus on FinOps practices,” they wrote.
In Flexera’s report, 51% of organizations said they have a FinOps team on hand, with another 20% planning to have on by the end of the year.
Enterprise FinOps Platform
Vega Cloud’s Enterprise FinOps platform offers a number of services, including Vega Inform, for generating insights that help guide decision, forecasting spending, and managing budgets.
Vega Optimize combines the information from Inform with client-specific metadata and third-party tools to generate more customized recommendations, and Vega Operate, which combines the information from the other two services and automates corrective actions like reducing time-consuming tasks, human error, and bottlenecks.
Cosmoo is not the company’s first shot at AI, according to Clements. Vega Cloud already uses what he called “discriminative AI” – essentially not generative AI – that leverages machine learning algorithms to enable the platform to deliver anomaly detection and insightful recommendations.
“Cosmoo represents the next step in our AI evolution,” he said. “Cosmoo’s integration signifies a fusion of our robust AI foundation with state-of-the-art generative capabilities.”
Real-Time Answers
The chatbot’s interface lets users engage with it in a natural way, Clements said. It will answer questions in real time and provide dynamic visualizations of the data, making it easier to analyze spending patterns, forecast future costs, and identify anomalies. In addition, they can revisit and continue past conversations, giving them a continuous contextual experience, he said.
It runs in Vega Cloud’s cloud, a secure environment that runs in public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform while ensuring corporate data is protected via Vega Cloud’s security features.
“Vega Cloud has engineered Cosmoo in such a way as to never expose a customer’s data to any third-party genAI model,” Clements said. “This ensures a customer’s data stays secure and private and only used by the Vega Cloud Platform for specific things as identified in our standard terms and conditions.”
Vega Cloud isn’t done with AI, he added, saying that “our upcoming developments will further integrate AI into our platform both from an interactive perspective for end users and for practitioners to leverage to better manage their AI cloud investments.”
Along with Cosmoo, the company also rolled out new cost reporting and management tools, a data API, enterprise single sign-on enhancements, and improvements for developers, including custom integrations with the platform through client registrations.
