Santa Barbara-based RightScale has joined the ranks of Google, Twitter and PayPal as the winner of an award from the World Economic Forum, the group that holds its famous meetings in Davos each year.

The forum named RightScale a 2013 Technology Pioneer. The award goes to startups with “the potential to transform business and society,” according to a news release.

RightScale provides a cloud resource management system — that is, a way for IT professionals, Web-based companies and other heavy computing users keep straight all the cloud computing services they’re tapping from Amazon, Microsoft and Google and other providers, as well as clouds based on software from Santa Barbara-based Eucalyptus Systems.

As cloud computing has become more prevalent, more and more companies are offering to rent out their server farms to IT managers. RightScale’s focus has shifted toward helping multi-cloud users make sense of what’s on the market for a given project. The company said it has helped launch 4.5 million servers this year, increasing its multi-cloud customer base by 40 percent.

The company also recently acquired a cloud-cost forecasting tool called PlanForCloud, part of its effort to become a service that lets IT managers pick and choose which cloud providers are best and seamlessly move among them.

“If you don’t do anything in advance to allow you to move between cloud providers, it’s not that easy. There are a lot of differences between the APIs and how the low-level resources like storage behave,” RightScale CEO Michael Crandell told the Business Times earlier this year. “That’s what we do. We’re trying to expand this platform into more of a single pane of glass and a one-stop-shop for everything you’re doing in the infrastructure cloud.”