Densify: The Next-Gen Cloud-Learning Optimization Engine

In today’s IT market, optimal selection of public cloud services for applications is a daunting endeavor. While the allocation of insufficient resources for critical applications results in poor performance, overprovisioning leads to wastage of critical business dollars. To play it safe and not create an application issue, most IT teams decide to overspend by overprovisioning. The current global spend on public cloud services are at $68 billion and according to research firm IDC it will triple in the next three years. And studies have shown that up to 40 percent of this cost could be unnecessary spending.

Trying to get it right is humanly impossible to constantly match an application’s ever-changing resource demands with the best supply among millions of public cloud alternatives, many of which are being changed daily. Pick the wrong type, and the compute intensive app slows down to a crawl. Size for monthly peaks without using burstable instances, and the wasted resources triple the cost. Continue using dated generations and end up with poor performance and rising expenses.

Toronto based Densify is at the vanguard of providing groundbreaking predictive analytics software that allows applications to become self-optimizing of their resource requirements and dynamically match their needs to optimal cloud supply. “Our ultimate value proposition is to automate the selection of optimal cloud infrastructure, making applications self-aware and self-optimizing,” says Gerry Smith, CEO of Densify.

Densify’s predictive analytics leverages machine learning to track minute-by-minute usage of the myriad of resources required for applications. The cloud-learning optimization engine, named Cloe, then learns the usage patterns of an application and perfectly matches them to the exact best match of millions of cloud alternatives.

“Now imagine if your apps could intelligently gauge their resource demands every hour of the day, every day of the year. Imagine if they constantly matched themselves to the best-suited cloud instances, container sizes, and nodes as their resource needs change, and, as better technologies become available. And what if this application had the intelligence to tap into the entire cloud catalog across all public cloud alternatives, honor business policies, offer competitive cloud prices, understand how to leverage burstable instances, provisioned IOPS, local storage, scale groups, and decide whether convertible reserved instances make sense.” says Gerry Smith.

Densify is regarded as a true SaaS provider, as there is no software to install, maintain, or learn, and also the need to hire additional staff doesn’t arise, as the solution is delivered as-a-service with a cloud expert assigned to each customer. When customers approach Densify, they are offered a free trial of the service. “Once the customers sign up, within 48 hours we show results by recommending changes to their usage of the public cloud in terms of what they select and how they buy to get better performance and significantly reduce the cost,” asserts Smith. The proficient cloud advisors act as an extension of the customer’s team to keep their cloud forever optimized. Densify’s team of advisors works with customers daily to ensure the optimization engine is tuned to customer requirements. Smith cites an anecdote of Ticketmaster, a large entertainment company, where Densify optimized their cloud workloads. The entertainment company manages their entire business through critical applications that run on both public and private cloud infrastructure. The allocation of optimal infrastructure is a business imperative for Ticketmaster to deliver better customer experience through enhanced application performance. The company realized that they need an automated machine-learning tool to address challenges of selecting the optimal cloud resources for their critical business applications. Densify’s optimization engine has helped the entertainment company to automate the cloud optimization process across their entire public cloud estate.