Month: September 2022

Doing cloud cost and optimization management well often calls for the help of an external vendor. That’s why Amalgam Insights has been publishing our in-depth series on the challenges associated with running a cloud cost and optimization management practice, as well as reasons to rely on third-party platforms and services for assistance.

With that in mind, Amalgam Insights presents the third of our ten vendor profiles — this one featuring Apptio Cloudability. (As a refresher, the first profile focused on SADA ; the second on Spot by NetApp.)

Read on for our analysis, which is part of our new Vendor SmartList report,Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available to download after purchase.

THE BOTTOM LINE: WHY APPTIO CLOUDABILITY FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

• Built on Financial Operations (FinOps) principles
• AI capabilities based on more than a decade of cloud data
• Designed for users beyond the IT department

ABOUT APPTIO CLOUDABILITY

Apptio Cloudability is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management.

Cloudability was founded in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, to manage cloud billing and usage cost data. It was acquired by Apptio in 2019 to add cloud cost management and optimization to ApptioOne’s capabilities. Bellevue, Washington-based Apptio supports more than 1,200 employees in offices in the United States, London, Sydney, Bangalore, and Krakow. Apptio serves midmarket organizations and enterprises, many of which fall within the Fortune 100.

Across its financial management portfolio, Apptio manages $650 billion in technology budget and Cloudability managed more than $9 billion in cloud spend in 2019 when it was acquired. The privately held company does not disclose how many customers it currently has, its annual revenue or other details including customer retention rates or Net Promoter Score.

APPTIO CLOUDABILITY’S OFFERING

Apptio brought in Cloudability in 2019 to augment its existing technology management capabilities; that strategy includes its October 2018 acquisition of FittedCloud to optimize cloud resources and the October 2020 acquisition of SaaSLicense for Software as a Service management.

Apptio Cloudability comprises cloud computing management and optimization — and, through the separate Total Cost module, reporting and analytics — for multicloud environments, containers, and software as a service (through the SaaSLicense acquisition). The platform is designed for IT, finance, and business teams seeking to manage cloud costs, although the company states that it now talks more with head executives — CEOs, CFOs, and cloud directors in Cloud Center of Excellence groups and procurement — during the sales process.

Apptio Cloudability ingests, normalizes, and structures billing usage data from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. This approach is used on an ongoing basis to continuously improve the economics of running cloud environments with financial operations (FinOps) principles in mind. Apptio Cloudability also delivers rightsizing recommendations for an organization’s cloud environment and AWS savings. Apptio Cloudability sees its users spend the most money on AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure, then Google Cloud. The platform’s savings plans capabilities show users where they can reduce and optimize cloud costs while also forecasting their spend.

Apptio Cloudability sets its pricing on the cloud spend covered under one or three-year contracts. It considers discounts on a case-by-case basis. Apptio Cloudability does not require a minimum number of users or spending. The standard Cloudability package comes with basic help desk and technical assistance. Add-on options include professional services (e.g., building a FinOps practice), training, and certification delivered through the FinOps Foundation. Apptio Cloudability offers optimization and allocation-assistance packages separately; they are priced based on the size of work required. Finally, the TotalCost module is available as an add-on, with tiered pricing based on annual cloud spend.

Through integrations and mapping, TotalCost covers all the major public cloud providers, as well as Oracle, Alibaba, and IBM, and ancillary cloud vendors including Snowflake and CrowdStrike. Cloudability uses TotalCost as a means for helping organizations better grasp all the cloud platforms and services influencing their total cost of cloud ownership, and charge back expenses as needed.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Apptio Cloudability states that it wins business for its focus on FinOps capabilities, as well as its savings plans and rightsizing modules. The latter modules provide additional analytics and machine-learning capabilities for clients, allowing Apptio Cloudability to generate recommendations through proprietary algorithms that can analyze as much as 15 years’ worth of a company’s data.

Apptio Cloudability goes to market both through direct sales and through an emerging indirect channel made up of managed service providers and consultants.

APPTIO CLOUDABILITY’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Apptio Cloudability plans to keep investing in providing more detailed optimization recommendations for discounts, developing integrations with cloud data and hyperscaler vendors to support sourcing workflow, and supporting localization, currency, and data sovereignty updates to make Cloudability available in more geographies.

Amalgam Insights expects that Apptio will also invest in capabilities to support managed service providers with improved white-labeling and integration, and to continue developing container cost optimization capabilities for Kubernetes and Docker-based workloads.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations, particularly those with multiple clouds, interested in a FinOps focus vet Apptio Cloudability. Apptio should be considered by organizations seeking to control costs and budget resources. Because of Apptio’s history in supporting FinOps as a formal practice, organizations with formal FinOps training or experience should assess Apptio. Amalgam Insights also recommends that organizations seeking to provide additional cloud cost visibility to non-IT executives (such as finance, accounting, and procurement) involved with cloud decision-making and tracking in support of those processes evaluate Apptio.

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.

As we’ve noted throughout our series on cloud cost and optimization management, choosing a vendor for this practice is no easy feat. A number of companies provide software and services germane to making the most of cloud environments — it’s tough for organizations to sift through all the marketing messaging. Amalgam Insights has taken on much of that footwork on behalf of enterprises, and we continue to present our findings in our series, which includes vendor profiles published in no particular order. This second profile looks at Spot by NetApp.

WHY SPOT BY NETAPP (INCLUDING CLOUDCHECKR) FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

• Continuous cost optimization, not just one-time, across public clouds
• Automated platform that reduces burden on operations personnel
• Includes development, finance, security, and cloud operations based on both in-house development and acquisitions

ABOUT NETAPP

NetApp is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 1992, NetApp has grown from a premises-based provider of computer storage to its current iteration as hybrid cloud data services company. As of 2021, NetApp employed 10,500 people around the globe, across all of its divisions. The company reported $5.74 billion in revenue in 2021. In 2020, NetApp acquired Spot to gain cloud cost optimization capabilities and enter the cloud cost market. In 2021, NetApp bought cloud financial and operational optimization vendor CloudCheckr, adding those capabilities to its Spot by NetApp portfolio. CloudCheckr reported more than $4 billion in cloud spend under management when NetApp acquired it. NetApp’s cloud cost control and optimization offering targets midsized and large enterprises seeking to optimize cloud costs scaling up to Fortune 500 firms.

NETAPP’S OFFERING

The Spot by NetApp portfolio brings together a variety of organic and acquired capabilities to create a platform that gives professionals in development, security, finance, and cloud operations holistic, cross-departmental insight. The acquired companies include cloud optimizer Spot and cloud cost management solution CloudCheckr. Spot brings expertise in managing containers such as Kubernetes, which can rack up cloud costs quickly. CloudCheckr offers the visibility and governance around cost and security, including the allocation and chargeback of cloud computing costs to specific departments.

Spot shows which aspects of the cloud environment need right-sizing with more than 600 best-practices checks around cost management, security and compliance, usage and performance, and availability. Spot sets parameters to implement and automate recommendations for procurement, finance, security, and IT to all share visibility to the organization’s cloud infrastructure (including containers, virtual machines, data and web applications, and micro-services).

Spot achieves this combination of operational and financial visibility by combining CloudCheckr with its already existing platforms: Eco (for finance), Spot Security (for security teams), Spot PC (for cloud operations), and Elastigroup and Ocean (for developers). CloudCheckr delivers the visualization capabilities and best-practices checks that help assure continuous optimization.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

The Spot portfolio competes most against do-it-yourself cloud cost optimization and management tools, as well as vendors including VMware CloudHealth and IBM Turbonomic. The company finds that it wins deals among customers seeking a combination of analytics, visibility, automation, and governance and security (via the CloudCheckr platform).

As such, the Spot by NetApp portfolio combines the functionalities that affect cloud spend and governance with process automation to support cloud savings. Furthermore, NetApp provides dashboards and report visualizations for greater collaboration among users.

NetApp goes to market through its direct sales teams as well as a large contingent of managed services providers (MSPs), many of whom came to the vendor through the CloudCheckr acquisition. Capabilities for MSPs include:

• Automation and streamlining of cloud services billing
• Ability to offer cloud desktops as a service
• Improved cloud security and compliance
• Ability to support a FinOps practice
• Reserved instances arbitrage, custom rates, and charges
• White-labeling for interface and reports

NetApp’s reference customers for cloud cost management include Samsung, HPE, IBM, University of Notre Dame, and Sony.

NETAPP’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

NetApp intends to keep growing its Spot portfolio. To that end, the company in spring of 2022 acquired Instaclustr, which offers a fully managed open-source database, pipeline, and workflow applications as a service. This purchase will bolster Spot’s capabilities to support cloud operations. NetApp also plans to continue building its MSP channel.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations seeking financial and operational control of complex cloud environments consider Spot, either based on the scale of operations (typically $1 million+ annual spend), multi-cloud support, and the importance of cloud computing to the organization’s core operations. Developer teams or smaller organizations can also deploy Spot to target specific projects or workloads. The Spot portfolio, with its automation, workflow management, and analytics, offers insight into four key spend areas of operations — development, finance, security, and cloud. This breadth allows each group to gain visibility into other departments and to coordinate and align efforts to optimize cloud computing environments.

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report,Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.

Over the past few weeks, Amalgam Insights has delivered an in-depth look at the state of organizations’ cloud cost management and optimization initiatives, and discussed the challenges associated with improving those activities.

A significant challenge includes choosing the right vendor from among the many. Indeed, sifting through marketing and sales noise proves no easy task. Organizations often don’t know whether they would benefit most by teaming with a vendor directly, or by partnering with a managed service provider or professional services consultant — or by using a mix.

The options quickly become overwhelming for IT, finance, procurement, and other leaders responsible for improving how the organization spends money on cloud computing. In fact, in response (to some degree), some companies still try to manage and optimize their cloud resources through spreadsheets and other homegrown approaches. Manual practices, however, fail the organization. There are just too many cloud services and infrastructure considerations in even a single company to accurately track and manage without automation, tagging, cross-charging, and other imperative capabilities.

Therefore, as part of our continuing efforts to educate end users, Amalgam Insights presents the next portion of our Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession series: profiles of distinguished cloud cost management and optimization vendors.

Each of the companies earning Amalgam Insights’ “Distinguished Vendor” badge has undergone rigorous evaluation through briefings, presentations, and documentation analysis. Over the coming weeks as we publish more vendor profiles, note that we do so in no particular order. With that, we begin with SADA.

WHY SADA FOR COST CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

• Takes a best-practices consulting approach
• Offers professional services and fully managed service approach
• Focuses on helping clients build skills so they can continue saving money independently

ABOUT SADA

SADA is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. SADA is a managed services provider (MSP) that supports enterprises. Founded in 2000, the company typically works only with Google Cloud as a managed cloud computing vendor. However, the expertise and recommendations from its cloud cost and optimization team span multiple cloud environments. SADA is based in Los Angeles with offices in Armenia and India; overall, SADA employs around 750 people. The MSP does not disclose its annual revenue, number of clients, or amount of cloud computing spend under management. SADA’s cloud cost and optimization consultants are designed to help clients across verticals who spend more than $2 million per year on cloud computing.

SADA’S OFFERING

SADA does not develop cloud cost or optimization management software. Rather, its consultants specialize in Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations), showing enterprises how to save money — such as running non-production workloads only during work hours. At the same time, SADA’s experts teach enterprise FinOps professionals how to understand and oversee their cloud spending.

SADA delivers its assistance through various professional services packages. For example, the MSP can help configure cloud cost management tools, expose insights, demonstrate how to pull in business intelligence resources such as Tableau, and share best practices with the enterprise’s FinOps personnel. This can include identifying other people within the organization — from departments such as IT and procurement — who should join the FinOps team for the benefit of controlling and making the most of cloud computing spending. Along the way, SADA’s cloud cost management and optimization experts will produce assets such as runbooks and toolkits that clients can refer to as they improve their internal operations.

Standard FinOps services from SADA include in-person consultations, written reports with optimization suggestions, creation of database scripts for BigQuery to improve reporting, assistance in customizing tools such as Apptio Cloudability, and delivering customized runbooks and live enablement sessions.

Each professional service package features a fixed fee for a specific number of months. Pricing depends on which package and how much an organization spends each year. An enterprise typically needs a minimum of $2 million in annual cloud computing expenses to support SADA’s fee structure. SADA aims to save clients several times what it charges but does not make guarantees prior to meeting with clients as the company cannot promise an amount saved until consultants understand the depth of the problems on a case-by-case basis.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Because of its people-first, FinOps-only approach, SADA finds that it does not face much competition. It does not compete against platforms at all. SADA’s consultants might work alongside an enterprise’s systems integrator, such as Accenture or Deloitte, but those firms tend to specialize beyond FinOps.

The SADA cloud cost and optimization management team generally finds its customers by word of mouth, through referrals, or from Google Cloud itself. SADA conducts workshops and experience labs with Google Cloud’s own FinOps practice, too. SADA does not publicly disclose its reference customers. However, the company gave Amalgam Insights access to customers so that analysts could verify that SADA serves organizations with multi-billion dollar revenues.

SADA’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

In terms of a roadmap, SADA’s cloud cost management and optimization team intends to reach more technical professionals. That way, FinOps principles can carry over more into departments including IT, spreading greater cloud financial discipline throughout the organization.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations spending at least $2 million per year on cloud computing consider SADA for FinOps guidance to reduce unnecessary spending if they are seeking to bolster the capabilities of their internal staff. Managing and optimizing cloud spending requires expertise, and organizations can thrive by empowering their own people to handle those requirements. First, though, they need to learn the nuances of what impacts cloud spending and the subsequent best practices for managing those factors, which SADA’s consultants demonstrate and impart.

Consider SADA if your organization is seeking to learn how to manage cloud expenses, but is not in search of a vendor to permanently manage cloud expenses. SADA does not aim to stay within an organization indefinitely to support cloud costs. Instead, the MSP promotes a “teach to fish” ethos so enterprises eventually can become their own cloud FinOps experts. As cloud computing continues to enable new and more business models, products, and services, strengthening the enterprise’s FinOps and IT skills will prove vital to remaining competitive.

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.

It should come as no surprise that Amalgam Insights believes that any organization supporting fast-growing cloud ecosystems must oversee those resources with proven software and/or managed or professional services. After all, the benefits typically outweigh any drawbacks executives might associate with partnering with yet another third-party provider. In fact, organizations spending more than $1 million each year on cloud infrastructure and platforms as a service are prime candidates for adopting cloud cost management and optimization solutions

Indeed, not doing so jeopardizes financial, operational, strategic, and governance initiatives. In the face of a global recession, the thread of double-digit inflation, and ongoing investor and executive pressure, controlling costs and making the most of technology will become even more of an imperative. And at a time when cloud computing costs often dwarf the net profit of an organization, rationalizing cloud costs can produce meaningful bottom-line results.

To that end, dozens of vendors specialize in providing software, tools, and services for managing and adjusting cloud computing resources. In some cases, they also deliver related managed services. However, choosing from among the multitude of possibilities does not present an easy task. Amalgam Insights has done the hard work so organizations may understand what makes one vendor different from another. Starting Sept. 15, we will publish a range of vendor profiles. That way, through our series on cloud cost management and optimization, and our report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, end users can gain the knowledge to make the ideal and differentiated choice.

In previous installments in our series on cloud cost management and optimization, we have covered why organizations need to implement these practices and pointed out the features that make vendors sound the same. Now it is time to understand five major differentiators that actually set providers apart from one another.

1. Automated Orchestration for Cloud Workloads

Some platforms automate the tasks that manage workload connections and operations, both on private and public clouds. This is important for easily enabling processes tied to specific workflows and business functions. Such software also provides automated, role-based accesses; this helps organizations better meet security and compliance requirements. And, finally, automated orchestration delivers cost savings — via greater efficiency — that likely will exceed the IT Rule of 30.

Recall, that Amalgam Insights’ IT Rule of 30 states that every unmanaged IT subscription spend category — cloud, mobility, telecom, SaaS, you name it — averages 30% in waste. If the organization spends, say, $1 million a year on technology subscriptions that are not proactively managed, odds are that $300,000 of that is going out the door unnecessarily. In other words, that money amounts to salaries and/or cash that could (should) have been conserved.

Accordingly, automated orchestration for cloud workloads features a great deal of capabilities that contributes to goals for spending wisely and saving money.

2. Budgeting Sources and Forecasting

IT and finance leaders need to understand cloud spending so they can adjust infrastructure and services and forecast accurately. These have grown into even more critical requirements as the world emerges from COVID-19 and faces a global recession. Therefore, Amalgam Insights recommends that companies with little to no experience in managing cloud expenses, accounting, and finance incorporate principles and best practices from organizations focused on cloud cost optimization such as the FinOps Foundation, an industry association that has focused on financial operations for cloud infrastructure and platform.

With that in mind, one of the key capabilities to look for in cloud management software itself is the ability to perform continuous cost optimization. This must be an automated process that scales applications, instances, storage buckets, and other cloud resources to avoid over-provisioning and reduce waste. We say the process must be automated because there are too much data and resources for any human to track manually.

In addition, this automated process needs to happen on a constant basis, ideally meaning multiple updates per day based on real-time usage. Cloud workloads change so quickly that IT and finance need near-real-time visibility and alerts. This way, IT can make adjustments on the fly while finance gleans the information it needs for accurate budgeting and forecasting.

Organizations benefit the most from cloud management and optimization platforms that deliver continuous, rather than intermittent, optimization.

3. Continuous Kubernetes Container Optimization

Similar to the section above, organizations using container management such as Kubernetes will require continuous optimization. It’s too easy for Kubernetes clusters to be over-provisioned, lie idle, or go unmanaged altogether.

Furthermore, a lack of oversight potentially sets the stage for the organization to fall out of compliance with governmental regulations and corporate policies.

Continuous optimization applied to Kubernetes resources, in specific, will support an organization’s goals for trimming or eliminating waste and for shoring up compliance requirements. 

4. Depth of Data to Support Machine Learning

Remember, IT and developers aren’t the only leaders who need to know what’s going on with the organization’s cloud environment. Other line-of-business heads — think finance, procurement, operations, even human resources — need visibility, too, for strategic decision-making. Cloud cost management is a team exercise with the cloud cost or FinOps manager as the hub of a center of excellence to support cloud resources.

This is where it becomes more vital that the cloud cost management and optimization platform gets feedback from the various inputs to improve recommendations over time.

5. Proprietary Intellectual Property

Finally, another differentiator among cloud cost management and optimization platforms comes in the intellectual property on which it’s built. Organizations with proprietary technology may have unique advantages in supporting and optimizing cost and may be able to prevent other vendors from pursuing a similar course of action. Organizations may experience tradeoffs between cost management and application performance or pursue more rapid cloud updates across hybrid cloud environments.

Next Steps

With this blog, and the previous four, Amalgam Insights has explained the need for cloud cost management and optimization, discussed the challenges in front of organizations, presented the areas in which vendors come off as similar, and why, and, here, identified true differentiators. The remainder of this blog series will focus on our profiles of 10 Distinguished Vendors. These independent assessments show how each company sets itself apart from the crowd. These evaluations will come in immensely handy for end users and resellers trying to solve cloud cost management issues. Expect the first profile on Sept. 15.

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for purchase. If you want to discuss your Cloud Cost Management challenges, please feel free to schedule time with us.