 Two Scottish Computing Science students, including a SICSA sponsored student, have recently achieved success in the world of business after their Edinburgh-based company ShopForCloud was acquired by US firm RightScale, a leader in cloud management. Following the acquisition the company has subsequently been rebranded PlanForCloud. Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, a SICSA sponsored student at the University of St Andrews (supervised by SICSA Director Ian Sommerville), and Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, a student at the University of Edinburgh, set up ShopForCloud in February 2012 and since then the company has moved from strength-to-strength.PlanForCloud enables sophisticated modelling of the components of cloud deployments, including servers, storage, database and data transfer, as well as usage scenarios that incorporate growth, seasonality and other variability in the consumption of cloud resources. With up-to-date prices from major cloud providers – including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace, and more to come – PlanForCloud lets users forecast costs on any supported cloud, save the forecasts, and later update them as cloud prices fluctuate. PlanForCloud automatically performs a simulation on planned deployments and generates detailed 3-year reports that enable companies to accurately budget for future usage. “When we launched PlanForCloud, it was clear businesses needed tools to help forecast their cloud costs across the constantly expanding list of cloud providers,” said Ali Khajeh-Hosseini,. “As cloud usage grows and becomes a larger part of corporate IT budgets, our service provides the tools businesses need to improve the visibility and predictability of their cloud computing initiatives.” The pair also commented “It is fantastic that RightScale has given us the flexibility to setup office in Edinburgh and enabled us to keep providing great new features for free. We are expanding our team and look forward to releasing a whole bunch of cool new features to help you plan for cloud. We think this is great news for the Scottish startup community….it sends out a buzz that the VCs [venture capitalists] and companies in California can see Scotland has got a great bunch of tech start-ups they can get involved with.” PlanForCloud can be used by any business to forecast clouds costs, including those that are not currently RightScale customers or users of cloud services. No cloud provider accounts or current cloud deployments are required to use the site or calculate cloud costs. Visit PlanForCloud at www.PlanForCloud.com. PlanForCloud are now recruiting – visit http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/recruitment.html for full details. |