Applications spread around multicloud infrastructure are difficult to manage from a technical perspective; budgeting and controlling cost for them — particularity, software as a service apps — can be equally tricky.

“SaaS has enabled shadow IT in a way that we’ve never seen,” said Mike Gersten (pictured, right), global innovation and strategy officer at SoftwareONE AG. The ease of purchasing SaaS applications has made all individuals in a company potential shadow IT hoarders — and put blinders on budgeteers.

“Now people are just buying whatever application they want in their department with their credit card,” Gersten said. “You can’t budget for it; you can’t manage what you can’t see.”

Gersten joined Lawrence Schwartz (pictured, left), chief marketing officer at SoftwareONE, in an interview during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

As for stuffing all apps and information technology into a single infrastructure locale for easy management — keep dreaming. The dispersed, messy multicloud ship has sailed, according to Schwartz.

“We don’t have any real conversations where people are talking about a single cloud that they’re working with; they’re working with multiple,” he said.

The reasons for using multiple clouds may be cost, contract flexibility, redundancy, compliance or security. “Some of it is, ‘I’ve got legacy applications that don’t work in one cloud infrastructure but will work in another cloud infrastructure,'” Gersten stated.

The ease of acquiring cloud infrastructure is a blessing and a curse that takes control largely out of IT’s hands. “You can’t say, ‘You have to use Amazon, or you have to use Microsoft,'” he added.

Multicloud panorama

Most companies know that they are overspending on software but feel it’s hopeless; many simply budget for the waste and call it a day, Gersten explained.

“The challenge for our customers is how do you take all the different cloud environments you’re working with that use different vernacular, bring it into one system that then is using a common language around the resources that sit in those cloud environments,” Gersten said.

SoftwareONE offers visibility across all cloud and on-premises environments for complete intelligence on spending. This allows customers to look at cloud resources and plan for them financially in the context of their particular businesses with a common vernacular across all cloud providers.

“That’s a difficult thing to do if you’re just going to a point solution from one of the publishers,” Gersten concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: SoftwareONE AG sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither SoftwareONE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE