Cisco’s multicloud management tool CloudCenter Suite is now globally available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

CloudCenter is based on Kubernetes, and Cisco originally launched the platform as self-managed, on-premises software. In January, the vendor added two new capabilities to the platform — Cost Optimizer and Action Orchestrator — and teased a pending SaaS roll out.

As their names suggest, Cost Optimizer is a cost reporting tool that provides companies visibility into their public and private cloud consumption and helps them right size their cloud workload instances. Action Orchestrator provides a set of adaptors and standardized interfaces for customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), And Kubernetes environments. This aims to simplify orchestration and workflow automation.

For example, Tuan Nguyen, Cisco’s principal engineer for CloudCenter, said he had a conversation with a customer who was spending about $600,000 per month mostly on AWS and Azure. “They said, ‘we want to reduce it by 5% this year,’ but they had no visibility into what they needed to cut,” he said. “It was just a blanket statement.”

So now they use Cost Optimizer to provide visibility and save money. They receive monthly reports that show cloud usage and growth trends. “And then they have an internal charge back billing system that they need to get informed about cloud costs,” Nguyen said.

Also since January, Cisco added CloudCenter support for IBM Cloud and VMware’s vCloud Director. The latter targets service provider customers who standardized their environments on vCloud Director, Nguyen said.

Making the cloud-management tool available as SaaS also has benefits to businesses, Nguyen added. It’s easy to on-board and Cisco manages it for the customer, he said. “The first benefit is they can use SaaS and not have to bear the burden of having to manage the platform. It runs on Kubernetes and they may not have the skill set to support that.”

As Cisco moves forward with the platform it plans to make available a software developer kit (SDK) for the orchestration layer so customers can build their own adapters, Nguyen said. “We’re also planning a lot of development focus on improving cost optimizer,” he added. This includes adding budgeting into the tool as well as more detailed cost savings recommendations. “For instance: you’re using this instance size and you don’t have a subscription. If you have a subscription, this is how much you’d save.”