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Hailing from Toronto, CiRBA brought its predictive analytics and planning solution to the Cloud Expo New York show this week to be a part of the discussion exploring how businesses control their virtual environments.

With a “new school” way of approaching managing cloud environments, CiRBA’s CTO and Co-founder, Andrew Hillier, shed some light on how the evolution of capacity management has led CiRBA to develop its Control Console.

Hillier emphasized the need for IT organizations to implement a management solution that allows them to drive up density while ridding themselves of risk. Particularly while making the move to a virtual environment, organizations find the need to consolidate their data centers. They can do that with the transformative elements of CiRBA’s Control Console.

Having launched the Control Console in the beginning of 2012, CiRBA has developed elements of its solution that underscore the importance of how policy drives analytics. Hillier said that all of CiRBA’s customers have the same needs – to consolidate their data – but with the ability to tailor to various policy requirements, they will be best able to build accurate, forward-looking models.

“Analytics is all driven by policy,” said Hillier. “The need for analytics is the same across all our customers. The actual analytics are the same, but what vary are the policies.” He noted that each organization has different criteria for operations, and with CiRBA’s policy-driven product, they can address their individual complexities.

But the bigger part of CiRBA’s solution is its visualization. Hillier indicated that when businesses bundle their converged infrastructures, what they’re doing is taking the physical complexities – the servers, wires, etc. – and bringing them into a clean physical form. “We visualize what is happening,” he said. What CiRBA helps them do is bring them into virtual complexity.

A significant feature of the CiRBA Control Console is its provision that allows businesses to set up a booking system model. The organization can input data that has not yet been incorporated into its infrastructure, such as the deploying of a new application in a couple of weeks, and is then able to analyze the outcome.

“A lot of customers are data-rich, and they have the capacity tools, but they don’t have ways of controlling all of it,” said Hillier. “They don’t have ways to link their data to analyses. There is an analytics revolution happening. You have to take the data and make decisions from that.”