Luxembourg based company emma is making waves in the cloud computing industry with its solution for managing multiple cloud environments. The company provides a platform that allows customers to manage their various cloud deployments through a single tool, offering visibility and control over resources, team members, and spending.
Founder Dmitry Panenkov has started his journey as a networking engineer in the tech industry in 2002. Since then, he has held leadership roles in product management, sales and business development most recently at Arista Networks, Juniper Networks, and Allot. He is also an EMBA Lecturer and a frequent speaker at industry events such as WebSummit, SaaStock, MPLS Congress, Mobile World Congress.
At emma – short for enterprise multi-cloud management application – he has brought together a team of highly skilled individuals to create the world’s first end-to-end, no-code multi-cloud management platform that enables organizations to unlock all benefits of multi-cloud without the associated complexities and security risks.
Challenge
The idea to create a multi-cloud management solution came from Dimity’s US experience building and selling networking switches for data centers. Many customers struggled with managing different cloud environments and at the time, no solution to manage all these environments within a single tool was available.
But the vision was to not only create visibility into multi-cloud environments and simplify its management, but to evolve the emma-platform to a comprehensive solution supporting strategic business objectives.
Today the emma platform provides a set of capabilities that are designed to help organizations manage their cloud resources more effectively including tools for transferring workloads and building networks that connect different clouds, cost management and automation features.
Business objectives
Dmitry explains: “Our customers opt for the emma platform for several reasons. Cost is only one.” Dmitry provides an example:” Our platform allows users to deploy Kubernetes clusters across different cloud providers, enabling them to take advantage of the cheapest and fastest available cloud capacity around the world. The platform’s automation tools also help users make informed decisions about which cloud providers to use based on their internal policies.”
He adds another reason: “As more companies adopt cloud computing as part of their digital transformation efforts to enhance and streamline business operations, there is a growing need for solutions that help better align multi-cloud environments to the business strategies and objectives. These customers have deployed the emma platform to accelerate time-to-market, reduce expenses, and improve business processes, operations, and customer experiences.
Simplicity
Dmitry explains his vision on the platform: “We believe in simplicity and stand for no code, but there is no way around AI as it will help human to work faster and smarter.”
While being a no-code, web-based application, the emma platform caters to the expectations of both engineers and business users. It enables users to create, manage and optimize any virtual infrastructure with a couple of clicks. Through an intuitive and user-friendly interface users can easily deploy, manage, and scale clusters, applications, and virtual machines.
On AI he says:” We do not believe that AI or any other platform can replace humans, but AI can add tremendous value to the work of all of us. Therefore, the emma platform uses machine learning to collect actionable metrics from multiple sources, at the same time it considers factors such as instance usage to accurately predict cloud consumption and resource utilization. The keyword here, again, is simplicity.”
He concludes: “Anyway, I think the question ‘simple or intelligent’ is not the most important challenge. The shortage of highly skilled professionals and the availability of tools on the market that are difficult to use for business users – that is the real challenge. That is why I believe we need to add another dimension to the future of cloud management where things are simplified.”
Reducing barriers
Regarding this dimension Dmitry is clear: “We definitely want to add this new dimension to the cloud industry. By simplifying cloud management and integrating under an all-in-one dashboard so far siloed capabilities such as comprehensive cloud management and multi-cloud support, automated resource optimization, advanced compliance and security, we want to reduce the barrier to multi-cloud entry. After all, at emma, we believe that cloud resources should be a commodity, easy to access just as electricity, or the internet.”
“So, whether you are building a car or furniture, your core business is not IT. Of course, you still need to spend a lot of time and money on high-skilled professionals building websites, applications, and other IT-related things, because it’s necessary to become an IT-like company yourself or hire engineers excessively because you don’t know how to simplify things.”
Ambitious
Dmitry has also a plan for the near future, after securing Seed funding from leading venture capital firms such as RTP Global. “We want our customers to stay in control of their cloud infrastructure and therefore also cloud spend. Through our own multi-cloud networking backbone, we don’t only enable a seamless network connectivity but our customers realizing cloud bill reductions of between 30 to 45 percent – up to 75% in some cases.”
On the roadmap for emma is the improvement of the existing native connectors to its customers’ private clouds, allowing them to seamlessly scale workloads from private to public clouds, and avoid overheads in their hardware environments. And, to launch several new automation-related features, including infrastructure-as-code tools, schedulers, and autoscaling for services across different cloud service providers.
Dmitry concludes: “As the future of the cloud is intelligent also we need to think about how to make the emma platform more intelligent to help companies with their technological challenges. I fully agree but want to be guided herein by Albert Einstein’s quote ‘Everything should be made simple, but not simpler.”
See also
Gartner: Generative AI Drives Public Cloud End-User Spending
