Nutanix today added software-defined networking (SDN) and other cloud services to its software stack to kick off its .NEXT conference.

The new SDN tool called Flow comes built into the company’s Enterprise Cloud OS software stack. It provides microsegmentation, network automation and visualization capabilities, and service insertion and chaining to integrate additional network functions from Nutanix’s technology partners.

Flow uses real-time application visibility and technology Nutanix acquired from Netsil in March.

Also today, Nutanix launched its first software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products: Beam and Era, respectively.

“Nutanix Era builds on our hyperconverged infrastructure foundation,” said Greg Smith, VP of product marketing at Nutanix. “It is our first PaaS service, where we are starting to provide application-specific functionality, and it provides integrated database provisioning and full lifecycle management.”

Era is also built into Nutanix’s software stack. The initial release will provide copy data management services. It will initially support Oracle and Postgres database engines, with planned support for SQL and MySQL databases, Smith said.

This service also includes time-machine capabilities and application-specific APIs for creating point-in-time database copies. This is why the company named it Era. “It provides a time continuum,” Smith explained. “It allows companies to build IT for the future but still go back in time for data.”

Select customers are currently testing the service. Nutanix plans to make it generally available in the second half of the year.

The third new cloud service, Beam, is a multicloud management SaaS product. It is available now, and it initially supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Nutanix plans to add support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Nutanix-based private clouds at a later date.

Beam uses Minjar’s Botmetric technology, which Nutanix acquired in March. This technology already manages more than $1 billion of cloud spend across AWS and Azure.

“This gives companies deep insight into how their organization is using cloud resources, what they are using, how much they are using, and the cost,” Smith said. “It also projects out their costs over the long run.”

It also provides recommendations to optimize cloud consumption and spending, and ensure security posture and regulatory compliance. Companies can accept these recommendations and automatically implement them with one click.

“I think of it as an online financial advisor for cloud operators,” Smith said.“It tells me how much money I’m spending today, how much I’m projected to spend in the future, and what I can do to manage my cloud spend.”

While the service doesn’t compare costs across clouds — for example, alerting a company that it could save money by moving a specific workload from AWS to Azure — Nutanix plans to add multicloud cost analysis in the future, Smith said.