Artificial intelligence generates a lot of buzz in many sectors, including cloud management.
That includes firms using the cloud to help manage spending.
Ternary — a multi-cloud spend management platform launched in 2021 used by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud customers to optimize costs — announced on February 21 new AI-powered predictive capabilities that can assist its clients in calibrating variables to meet business needs.
“We’re beginning to take advantage of machine learning and AI to allow companies to look across their entire large datasets and then find patterns,” Sasha Kipervarg, CEO and co-founder of Ternary, said in a recent interview.
“We’re building a lot of tooling to connect in the financial systems. We are building tooling that allows companies to use our product inside their cloud environment. Much of this is sensitive data; they don’t want it to exfiltrate.”
AI enhancements boost spend management efficiencies
Using Ternary, the financial side can collaborate with engineering to optimize a business’s spend management plans.
Ternary’s AI-enhanced capabilities allow it to go beyond basic recommendations, Kipervarg said. It’s a “more sophisticated way of helping companies understand what they can do amidst all these moving parts to make their spend efficient.”
The types of variables Ternary clients can fine-tune using AI include recommendations for cost reductions, anomaly detection, and alerts to help reduce wasted efforts and the number of false positives.
“Imagine for a moment that you log into a tool (Ternary), and that tool ingests all your billing files and understands your environment,” Kipervarg said. “Imagine going to a console and pointing to a specific group within your company that spends X and saying, ‘How can I save $35,000 with this group?’ Ternary will then connect to the different data sources, observe the patterns constantly shifting dynamically hourly and offer a prediction for how to save that $35,000.”
The San Francisco-based Ternary, backed by venture-capital firm Fin Capital, works with over 340 active enterprise customers. It now manages billions of dollars in cloud spend.
Platform available in two forms: SaaS or self-hosted
Ternary makes its platform available as either a SaaS product or in a new way: self-hosted, also announced on February 21, for customers needing an isolated instance in their public cloud environment.
Ternary Self-Hosted now empowers infrastructure industries such as financial services, technology, military, and government to meet regulatory compliance, security, and data accessibility requirements.
Kipervarg calls his firm’s platform “a holistic approach to solving the cloud budget challenge.”
New features for enterprise readiness include fiscal calendar management, chargebacks, improved data retention, and stricter access controls.
“Companies are continuing to move into the cloud,” Kipervarg said. “They’re all beginning to be aware that they’re going to overspend in the cloud if they don’t build a FinOps practice if they don’t have a tool in place.”