Okay, Okay… so everyone around you is picking up their cloud ticket, your bosses are hammering you to figure out which cloud model is best for your company to deploy and your inbox is flooded with emails daily about the benefits cloud affords. But what about how much it costs? Where are those emails that delineate every cent you will spend migrating to and managing your cloud environment?

Fortunately, Cloud Cruiser stands poised in this environment to provide visibility into your cloud costs, because –let’s face it – cost is one of the key impediments for widespread cloud adoption.

Founded two years ago, Cloud Cruiser has emerged as a provider of transparent IT billing that delivers a bill of IT for chargeback throughout the cloud.

“We wanted to solve one of the key requirements for someone moving to the cloud, which is providing visibility into costs because what we see right now is that there is almost this mad rush for people to move to the cloud, but when they move to the cloud they have no visibility into what they are actually consuming in the cloud and no control over what they are spending,” Amritesh Chaudhuri, vice president of products at Cloud Cruiser, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East 2012 in New York this morning. “We are big believer of the cloud but in order for people to make informed decisions about the cloud, they need to have that visibility. They need to see at a granular level what your consumption data is and marry that back to accounting and budgeting structures.”

“In the old days, you knew that you were going to spend X amount of money on servers and infrastructure and that would be part of your IT budget,” he added. “You knew where the money was going. As soon as it moves to the cloud, it becomes a whole new game.”

Cloud Cruiser is the answer to one of the largest and most critical problems in the cloud market: cost visibility and optimization across heterogeneous cloud environments. With over 100 years of experience in resource mapping, collection, and chargeback, Cloud Cruiser provides scalable, on-demand IT systems and services.

According to company officials, Cloud Cruiser delivers a comprehensive suite of applications to map and measure resource usage independent of computing environment, allocating costs based on IT-defined criteria, and providing flexible and in-depth reporting of that usage. Whether you are using a private, public or hybrid cloud model or a legacy system, Cloud Cruiser enables business intelligence from many different levels and perspectives.

“We provide people with that single pane of glass so they can marry that information and make informed decisions,” Chaudhuri said. “We strongly believe that what we are doing is new in the space. In order to move to the cloud, you need to know what your spending will be in the cloud.”

Cloud Cruiser has set its sights on everyone from the small- to medium-sized business to the large enterprise, or anyone who has a direct need for getting a sense of where their cost data is going. The company’s efforts have also gained traction in the service provider community and those companies that offer cloud management platforms.

Specifically, Cloud Cruiser most recently established a relationship with HP and Microsoft (News - Alert) to deliver cloud cost intelligence and chargeback solutions.

“At the end of the day there are very few players in the market who have the length and breadth of the offerings which HP and Microsoft bring to the table in terms of what you can do in the cloud,” Chaudhuri  said. “We provide a very important component which is the chargeback component in their clouds so people can have visibility into their costs.”

In anticipation of Cloud Expo, Cloud Cruiser also announced a software reseller agreement with premier HP software reseller, Seamless Technologies, to deliver its cloud cost intelligence solution for HP CloudSystem. Seamless Technologies is a trusted provider of HP cloud solutions to enterprises and service providers, and can now deliver Cloud Cruiser's cost intelligence platform.

So, what can we expect from Cloud Cruiser for the rest of 2012?

“We will be expanding our footprint in the market, and the way we do this is by getting the adequate resources on our side to work with not just Microsoft and HP but to build out channel footprints,” Chaudhuri concluded. “People want to make sense of their costs; we need to scale to meet those demands.”