Brisbane ISV Cloud Ctrl offers platform for free to non-profits

Brisbane-based ISV Cloud Ctrl is now offering its eponymous cloud billing management platform for free to not for profit customers.

In a company announcement posted on LinkedIn, the Cloud Ctrl platform will be available for free to not for profit customers under $150,000 in monthly cloud spend, while those who spend more will be offered a flat rate of $149 per month.

“Our not for profit sector and non-government organisations (NGOs) have been hit hard over the last few years of the pandemic and are one of our most relied upon sectors in our communities across the globe. Add to that economic flux and natural disasters the sector is doing it tough,” the announcement read.

The offer covers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Cloud Ctrl’s software offering is a multi-cloud service management platform that acts as a brokering service, dashboard and management portal to help manage subscriptions and services for a customer’s cloud provider.

The company was a spin-off firm from Brisbane-based IT services and consulting firm SixPivot, which developed Cloud Ctrl internally through an innovation hub.

Cloud Ctrl sales director Rui Gago told CRN that the company decided that it wanted to give back to the not for profit sector to stay on mission.

“Our decision to share the Cloud Ctrl platform with nonprofits is very much about helping them deliver their promise back to society,” Gago said.

“For a small organisation it’s a big commitment, but at the same time at a platform level, we know that we can do it, and we want to make sure that we’re also giving back to society.”

Gago added the offer coincided with the platform’s recent relaunch, which aimed to make sure Cloud Ctrl got in the right people’s hands. It involved placing the platform in a scaleup motion for the company’s MSP partners.

The offer has now been taken up by four nonprofits prior to the announcement, which Gago said were secured via word of mouth. Cloud Ctrl has also engaged some larger nonprofits, with one testing the platform and seeing how the platform can be integrated into their day to day operations.

“This program has been thought out and planned out in that [Cloud Ctrl] actually knows it can afford to do it and sustain it,” Gago said.

“We’re entering it with the best of intentions and we want to make that long-term commitment.”

For the top end of town in the nonprofit sector, their usual requirements would suit large enterprises, and Cloud Ctrl has also launched a Step Up Scheme for them to help fund the smaller nonprofits.

“The intention of the scheme is not to generate money from the top end but to create a self sustaining group of people where we can also employ further customer service people and sales people to actually support them and dive into those accounts deeper, because there is a lot of people to cover.”