In today’s enterprise landscape, multicloud is no longer a strategy. Instead, it’s a reality, often borne of necessity rather than design, that drives demand for AI-driven multicloud management to tame complexity, rein in costs and deliver outcomes fast.

As enterprise workloads become increasingly complex, many organizations can inadvertently find themselves in multicloud environments. This situation can occur through acquisitions, regional gaps or shadow IT; sometimes, organizations may not even realize they’re in a multicloud.

That’s where Emma Technologies S.a.r.l. aims to provide a solution: Its AI-driven multicloud management platform is designed to bring clarity, control and cost efficiency to even the most fragmented cloud environments. The solution comes as some companies may sometimes think that multicloud adoption fell from the sky, according to Dmitry Panenkov, founder of Emma.

“They just simply tell us, ‘OK, we use AWS, but in the regions where we do not have AWS, there is another provider, and yet we actually also have an on-prem,’” he told theCUBE in December. “And you’re like, ‘OK, guys. You’re in a multicloud.’”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s examination of Emma Technologies and its approach to solving enterprise challenges in AI-driven multicloud management.

AI meets cloud complexity: Smarter multicloud control

This growing complexity isn’t going unnoticed. Gartner Research identified multicloud adoption as a dominant enterprise trend in 2024, driven by the need to balance performance, cost and flexibility across diverse infrastructure environments.

“We are seeing an explosion in the adoption of multicloud — it’s been happening over time,” said Sid Nag, vice president of cloud and AI services and technologies, Gartner Research, at Gartner Inc. “That begs the question: Why are people going multicloud? Because workloads are getting more complex. The ones being moved into the cloud and the primary cloud provider, although they may have all the capabilities to service that workload, may not be best in the cloud.”

As the market demand grows, Emma provides a control layer for enterprises struggling to manage sprawling multicloud environments. The company’s approach to AI-driven multicloud management helps capitalize on the current shift as environments have increasingly trended toward multicloud over the past several years, according to Rob Strechay, theCUBE Research’s managing director.

“Many are transitioning to cloud and now to multicloud environments, with organizations using these multicloud environments in more meaningful ways,” he said. “Even though they may not have thought about that intentionally, a lot of it has to do around applications and how they are using particular clouds for differing applications.”

Enterprises are seeking to simplify cloud sprawl while improving cost efficiency and operational control as multicloud becomes the norm. In this new era, here’s how Emma aims to turn multicloud chaos into strategic clarity with AI-driven multicloud management.

$17M fuels Emma’s push to unify clouds

The Luxembourg-based Emma, which stands for Enterprise Multicloud Management Application, was founded in 2019. The company officially launched its platform in 2022, growing its client base to include multiple industries such as gaming, fintech, healthcare and retail. The company’s goal is to help large organizations streamline operations across diverse cloud environments by unifying cloud-native and legacy systems, while helping them deploy, manage, analyze workloads and effectively reduce their cloud costs and usage, according to Panenkov. But there are big challenges involved, especially for larger companies.

“You have your environment at AWS, and then you decide to acquire someone smaller because of the business. You like the business, not the infrastructure, not the cloud service provider,” he said. “You acquired the guys, and you’ve got this multicloud. So, you have AWS, imagine they have Azure, and you need somehow to merge that.”

With the goals in focus, Emma announced last November that it had raised $17 million in early financing to expand the company’s product development and fuel growth. The Series A round, led by Smartfin Management BV with participation from RTP Global and existing investors, brought the company’s total funding to $23 million.

At the time of the announcement, the company stated that the funding would support expanded automation capabilities, introduce accelerated AI systems into its platform and provide broader support for cloud integrations. It would also position Emma to accelerate its expansion into the United States, where demand for multicloud management continues to grow.

From accidental to intentional multicloud

Many organizations struggle to gain visibility and control once they realize they’re operating in a multicloud environment. Emma’s centralized platform is built to simplify oversight and turn that complexity into a strategic advantage, according to Panenkov.

“We enable, with our centralized platform, to provide them with the visibility across the variety of the clouds, enforce different policies and offer the financial tools to control their costs,” he told theCUBE.

As organizations seek greater return on investment, they increasingly turn to platforms that offer flexibility while improving application resilience and reliability. Emma’s approach aims to help organizations from the resilience and reliability side of things as well, according to Panenkov.

“We have built our networking backbone that physically interconnects different cloud service providers,” he said.

Because of that networking backbone, Emma allows customers to seamlessly distribute their workloads across multiple cloud service providers. That enables customers to reduce dependencies on a single cloud, thereby minimizing downtime risks, Panenkov explained.

“Basically, our platform automates the deployment strategies and ensures the resilience, while optimizing applications’ performance across the environments,” he said.

The network is the backbone of how everything is connected, supporting not just connectivity, but also configuration and DevOps processes, which are key challenges in multicloud environments, Panenkov noted. The platform also offers additional tools that extend beyond what hyperscalers provide.

Emma offers a combination of managed services and AI-driven tools that allow customers to deploy workloads according to their specific needs. The company also provides unified cost analysis, proactive alerts and automated recommendations that extend beyond the capabilities of cloud-native tools.

“By consolidating these data across the different cloud service providers or from the different cloud service providers, our platform gives organizations actionable insights to cut waste and reallocate resources efficiently,” Panenkov said. “Basically, this is how we have our customers to get their IT budget back.”

The evolution of AI-driven multicloud management

Managing today’s multicloud environments requires intelligence, automation and the ability to adapt in real-time. Emma believes companies are moving toward intelligent, cloud-native platforms that use AI to automate operations, predict trends, optimize resources and make autonomous decisions across multicloud environments.

“AI-powered platforms like Emma offer centralized visibility, governance and control solutions in multi-cloud environments,” the company wrote in a recent blog. “It automates cost control and enables proactive decision-making to ensure financial accountability and align cloud investments with business objectives.”

Managing cloud environments can sometimes be seen as boring, according to Panenkov. Often, people are focused on the hype around AI or other bright objects.

“With our platform, we can automate the repetitive infrastructure management tasks or deployment tasks, integrate the CI/CD pipelines and provide out-of-the-box support for the variety of different environments,” he said. “This approach frees up platform engineers to focus on building really innovative features or solutions instead of managing the complex infrastructures. So, this is how we support them.”

As multicloud complexity continues to grow, platforms such as Emma are emerging as essential infrastructure with AI-driven multicloud management. It’s becoming clear that a centralized platform approach to governance and resilience is essential to effectively managing, optimizing and gaining value from multicloud environments, according to Strechay.

“Especially when these disparate and distributed environments may have occurred by accident via acquisition, shadow IT [or] differences in your business units,” he said. “[Emma] really helps to take advantage of what is going on in multicloud.”

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