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Cloud Cost Management Part 4: Why Cloud FinOps Vendors All Sound The Same

Too often, the process of selecting a technology provider — of any kind — unearths more questions than answers. In many instances, vendors’ sales and marketing messages confuse, rather than clarify, because they all sound so similar. This puts IT, procurement, and finance leaders in the frustrating position of trying to identify real differentiators, all while hoping for the best outcomes.

Choosing a cloud computing cost management and optimization vendor offers no exception. As we noted in the third installment in our blog series, most (although not all) of these providers make the same benefits statements to potential customers. So, instead of leaning on hope, Amalgam Insights recommends enterprise buyers use our ongoing guidance to identify important differentiators. We begin by presenting similarities Amalgam Insights has noted in vendor messaging that prove confusing to potential buyers.

4 Areas of Confusing Messaging Among Cloud Cost Management Vendors

Recall that, in the previous blog, we pointed out continuous optimization and automation/artificial intelligence as the first two examples of similarities shared among cloud cost management vendors. The remainder of this installment covers the four additional issues we have pinpointed as challenges for evaluating Cloud FinOps providers. Keeping these aspects in mind will allow executives and line-of-business heads to spot providers’ true differences more easily rather than reinventing the wheel. This will go a long way toward arming organizations with the knowledge needed to develop a vendor selection process that will help narrow down the ideal choice.

1. Container and Service Management

With the emergence of Kubernetes as a mainstream containerization platform, cloud computing can now be deployed more granularly. This makes cost and resource tracking even harder. When a workload is not attached to a specific resource or service, IT has more difficulty assigning it to a project or cost center. Organizations supporting stateless apps need to figure out how to track cloud usage. To meet this challenge, vendors will toss around the buzzphrase “Kubernetes management.” The tracking of containerized compute can be done proactively, optimizing nodes in expectation of workloads or reactive ways that look at the usage. Get insight from the vendor on how they support consumption below the application layer as “container management” is being used in a variety of ways to describe cost, operations, technology, workflow, and/or infrastructure accounting in various ways.

2. Single View of Multiple and Hybrid Clouds

Another commonality among solutions in our Amalgam Insights’ new report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, is that of the single interface. In this report, we focused on cloud cost management and optimization providers that bring together multiple cloud vendors and hybrid cloud resources (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, niche players, private clouds, on-premises hardware) under one roof. Rather than forcing users to access each cloud provider’s interface separately, third-party vendors’ management platforms deliver insight and reporting into each cloud through one portal. This reflects one of the basic benefits of using an independent cloud cost management and optimization platform. A variety of companies in the cloud cost management marketplace are still specialists in one or two cloud platforms. Make sure that your proposed vendor for cloud costs is aligned with your IT architects’ vision for cloud and data center usage.

3. Reporting and Analytics

Every cost management and optimization platform — cloud or not — contains reporting and analytics. The detail to look for is the depth and granularity of analytics, including the out-of-the-box alignment to IT, DevOps, finance, procurement, and other relevant cost and inventory management departments. Analytics can also be supported by algorithmic and machine learning models that help to predict future demand for resources, or that proactively detect potential opportunities for optimization. However, the presence of analytic and reporting capabilities that provide financial and operational visibility into multiple clouds is not in itself a differentiator within the cloud cost management world.

4. Managed and Professional Services

In addition to software, most cloud cost management and optimization vendors offer some level of professional or managed services, as well as help desk. While none of this is unique, the ways in which the services are delivered could be. Organizations will want to vet variances including the following:

  • Hours of Operation
  • Human vs. automated assistance
  • Dedicated or named account resources
  • Cloud provider certifications

Some organizations will require around-the-clock support availability while others will not. Some will have no issue using chatbots to resolve problems while others will want a human. Some will operate well with general assistance while others will opt for personnel dedicated to their account. Finally, some cloud cost management and optimization vendors may not certify all their staff on the various cloud platforms the organization uses.

Knowledge Is Power

Knowing what makes many cloud cost management vendors the same will equip IT, procurement, finance, inventory, and other leaders to pinpoint meaningful differentiators and therefore choose an ideal fit. Amalgam Insights has done much of the footwork for readers. In that spirit, the next blog will cover the key differentiators that analysts have identified among providers. From there, we will publish a number of vendor profiles. Combined, all this information will support organizations’ quests to most ably manage their cloud computing environments, especially as a global recession threatens to hit.

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.


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Cloud Cost Management Part 3: Exploring Why Cloud Cost Vendors Sound Similar

We Look at Two Ways in Which Providers Message Similarly to One Another

In the first two blogs in our series on cloud cost management, Amalgam Insights dove into why cloud costs are hard to manage and the challenges that impede many organizations from implementing disciplined cloud cost management and optimization. Those installments set the stage for this post, which lays out the value of relying on third-party software and services for cloud cost and lifecycle management. From there, we begin to explore the similarities observed among vendors, so organizations may spend less time and energy identifying the best fit(s).

Wait — Why Use a Vendor at All?

Any technology calls for proper oversight to ensure its best use and to assure optimal financial stewardship for the organization. To meet this need, dozens of companies provision software, and/or professional and managed services. When it comes to cloud cost management and optimization, these third-party offerings intentionally replace in-house counterparts. Surprisingly, a number of global organizations still rely on internal staff and piecemeal technologies to oversee and monitor their cloud environments.

Given the rapidly growing amount of cloud computing consumption, and the cost overages that easily accompany that usage, a homegrown approach must evolve, and quickly. Organizations must gain financial and operational visibility into their cloud environments. That starts by implementing a cross-departmental practice Amalgam Insights frames as Technology Lifecycle Management.

Figure 1: Technology Lifecycle Management

A Cautionary Note

Newcomers to the world of cloud cost control often are surprised to learn that using a cloud cost management and optimization platform may not inherently save substantial amounts of money on an ongoing basis.

In many cases, that is not, in fact, the overarching point.

Rather, the software will give IT — and finance and engineering — the data and recommended actions to make sure all cloud environments are running at their most optimal, are in use, and that they serve the organization’s needs.

Think of the matter this way: managing cloud computing does not mean cutting spending to the bone. Rather, organizations thrive when they support employees with the correct infrastructure and applications. (And, yes, that can call for putting more money into the cloud budget as tech serves as a driver for revenue creation.)

Many enterprises experience significant savings after first deploying a cloud cost management and optimization platform. Ttransforming an uncontrolled or poorly controlled environment into an efficient one will naturally lead to that outcome at first based on the IT Rule of 30. But as optimization continues, those gains fade because the platform is keeping the cloud environment at its most efficient.

Contrary to how it might sound, watching those gains disappear over time by creating an optimized environment actually is the goal. The right vendor will enable the organization to achieve that aim.

With that in mind, we now explore the first two ways in which many cloud cost management vendors end up sounding the same. The next blog will present more similarities among these providers. Amalgam Insights takes this approach so enterprise buyers are empowered to make their vendor selection processes more efficient and productive.

Sifting Through the Benefits Statements

With a couple of exceptions, cloud cost management and optimization vendors tend to make the same benefits statements to potential customers. Yet, once enterprise buyers understand those similarities, they will be better equipped to pinpoint important differentiators. In fact, later in this series, Amalgam Insights will publish a number of vendor profiles. The intent is that, by the time those go live, organizations will have the knowledge to create a matrix that will help narrow down the ideal choice.

Similarity 1: Continuous Optimization

Cloud management platforms must support continuous optimization as cloud performance and transactional activity accelerate, and as companies become increasingly susceptible to peak usage and other cost challenges associated with the flexibility of cloud computing.

The greatest benefits of an always-on optimization effort that pulls billing information directly from the cloud provider are the prevention of overspending and the right-sizing of consumption.

Unless a vendor delivers professional services rather than an actual platform, enterprises have the right to expect the cloud management software to perform constant right-sizing actions on a daily basis, or even more frequently, leading to the best use of the cloud environment. This capability has become table-stakes within any technology management platform and a vendor that overemphasizes continuous optimization may be lacking in other important areas.

Similarity 2: Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Continuous optimization relies on some level of automation, which is vital in a cloud cost management and optimization platform. After all, reducing human intervention is key to achieving more accuracy and efficiency. Given the massive volume of cloud computing billing and usage data, it is not humanly possible to manually check all of the data that comprise a cloud bill — at least, not without automation and an algorithmic-checking approach.

Note this important caveat: Most vendors will refer to their automation as “artificial intelligence,” largely because of the sophistication and modernization the term calls to mind. However, most of the automation in question is actually algorithmic processing with some aspects of basic regression to identify correlation and trends. Amalgam Insights sees that the majority of “AI” in this particular market typically lacks the feedback mechanisms, model training, and ongoing data science required to be considered modern AI. This isn’t necessarily an issue, as cloud computing usage is often driven by discrete and specific business needs or by the developer team’s needs. But the obvious advice here is to always follow up on AI claims, as there is no current standard on what constitutes AI in this market.

Enterprises would do well to inquire about how each platform automates data, and how it learns from recommended and implemented actions. If the software just imports information and populates fields, that — while handy — is rudimentary and standard.

Consider, as well, that a cloud cost management and optimization platform should remove the need for excessive manual manipulation, both to reduce the potential for human error and to foster any intelligence that will help the software learn from actions.

In the next installment, get more insight into more similarities among cloud cost management and optimization vendors.

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.

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September 2: From BI to AI (CelerData, Fidap, Nexla, Run:ai, StarTree, Teradata)

Funding and Finance

StarTree Raises $47M in Series B Funding

Realtime analytics platform StarTree announced a $47M Series B funding round this week. GGV Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and CRV, and new investor Sapphire Ventures. StarTree will use the funding for product development and to grow its sales and marketing capabilities.

Updates and Launches

CelerData Incorporates From StarRocks 

Realtime analytics provider StarRocks announced that they had incorporated CelerData to lead StarRocks development, grow its dev community, and build commercial products based on StarRocks. Forthcoming releases include CelerData Enterprise as an on-prem deployment of StarRocks with added enterprise security features, and CelerData Cloud, a managed cloud service. 

Run:ai Reveals Hybrid Cloud AI Orchestration Capabilities for Atlas Platform 

AI compute orchestration provider Run:ai announced that their Atlas Platform now supports hybrid cloud and multi-cloud AI infrastructure. Atlas provides a centralized panel that abstracts connecting to cloud platforms’ Kubernetes infrastructure, simplifying the process of managing compute orchestration.

Teradata Debuts VantageCloud Lake

Teradata Updates ClearScape Analytics

Teradata made two major announcements this week. Cloud data lake VantageCloud Lake launched on AWS, marking Teradata’s first venture on its brand new cloud-native architecture. It’s intended to be a self-service counterpart to VantageCloud Enterprise, which is designed for a more traditional IT-managed environment. Teradata also announced updates to its analytics platform, ClearScape Analytics. New features include new time-series and machine learning in-database analytics capabilities, as well as an integrated and governed model management framework. VantageCloud Lake is available on AWS now, with availability on other major cloud networks in early 2023; ClearScape Analytics is available today.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Data Engineering Automation Company Nexla Acquires Clean Data Provider Fidap  Nexla, a data engineering automation company, announced late last week that they would acquire Fidap, a provider of cleansed data. As a result of the acquisition, Nexla will provide ready-to-use datasets, both public and commercial.

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Cloud Cost Management Part 2: Organizations Are up Against Big Challenges in Cleaning Up Cloud Costs — COVID Cleanup, Skills Shortages

The first blog in this series on cloud management and optimization discussed why organizations must make the most of their cloud computing environments – especially as a recession appears likely.

Now, in this second  installment, Amalgam Insights analysts lay out the argument in favor of using third-party software, consultancies, and managed services to achieve optimal cloud management status.

We do so knowing that many executives, fearful of a global economic slowdown, might feel tempted to automatically resist the recommendation to bring on another vendor. Thus, we take a step back to paint a picture of the challenges organizations are up against, and share insight, based on collective years of experience, about why paying to manage the cloud environment will, when done right, deliver the greatest value.

Cloud Management and Optimization: It’s About Much More Than Saving Bucks

As a reminder, almost any cloud management and optimization activity can save costs, at least to some extent. That is, of course, useful to any business intent on conserving financial resources. However, more to the point is that cloud management and optimization should lead to more productive, efficient, and deliberate use of cloud computing. After all, cloud supports remote and hybrid workers, as well as strategic corporate initiatives. Therefore, it must deliver. Rarely (if ever, frankly) do organizations get the most out of their cloud environments by trying to monitor and manage cloud resources through spreadsheets or piecemeal efforts.

In other words, Amalgam Insights asserts that it usually makes sense to spend money on the well-chosen cloud management and optimization tools — tools that support revenue-generating initiatives, whether directly or indirectly. The adage, “Spend money to make money,” rings true here as companies seek to eliminate duplicate resources, select the right storage and compute options for data and workloads, and tweak environments so they perform at their best.

The third-party platforms to which we refer support cloud environments at scale. They remove dependence on ungovernable, internally created spreadsheets, on hastily created Git pages with inconsistent documentation standards, and on disparate notes.

Yet, before teaming with a cloud cost management and optimization software, or a professional or managed services provider, it is vital to understand the challenges all organizations share, as well as those that are more specialized, which may require a more custom approach. After considering all the guidance in Amalgam Insights’ 2022 report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, IT, finance, and data leaders should find themselves well-equipped to identify and choose among the options. (Any enterprise executives in search of independent assistance are invited to arrange a consultation with Amalgam Insights analysts. )

The Enterprise Challenges Addressed By Cloud Management and Optimization

Regardless of size, organizations relying on cloud computing face a variety of challenges, especially in the wake of COVID-19-fueled rollouts. Recall that the pandemic in early 2020 forced most businesses worldwide to increase adoption of cloud computing — whether infrastructure, platform, and/or applications — so they could remain operational amid lockdowns and economic upheaval.

The sudden flurry of deployments often was messy; IT personnel quickly spliced together cloud solutions to keep employees connected so they could work remotely. In most cases, there was little or no time to think about how many cloud environments were running.

Then, as enterprises shifted from full-on crisis to figuring out the New Normal of worker expectations, organizations generally did not pause to assess the state of their cloud environments. This typically came down to a lack of awareness or internal skills.

At the same time, the pandemic created a staff and skills shortage that continues into 2022 and will extend beyond 2023. As an example, a recent Korn Ferry study indicates that, by 2030, the world will experience a human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. The staffing challenge is real. When it comes to evaluating and managing cloud environments, there are simply fewer IT experts available to conduct this work for their employers.

Despite the skills shortage, finance executives have grown more aware of looking into and trying to track cloud computing expenses. Still, this presents another hangup for enterprises that do not manage their cloud estates. The finance department lacks the granularity of data that will deliver the reports and insights needed. These leaders need the information that supports asking the right questions of the IT department about cloud computing outlay — and that helps them allocate charges among business units. Simply put, most organizations do not have usable visibility into their cloud environments.

Assessing Cloud Governance, Security, and Provisioning

Alongside the previous challenge lie two more — an absence of governance and security. Organizations that do not properly manage their cloud computing environments risk running afoul of their own policies, not to mention possibly those of various governments. Many organizations also are enacting environmental and sustainability initiatives. A number of cloud cost management and optimization platforms now support those efforts; spreadsheets cannot.

In addition, speaking to security, cyber threats gain even more traction within unmanaged cloud environments. While responsible cloud stewardship does not guarantee insulation against hacks, an absence of said stewardship almost certainly guarantees a breach.

Finally, many organizations are operating in over-provisioned cloud environments due to a variety of situations — say, employee demands for certain applications, an enterprise’s regional or global footprint, and idle resources.

All of the factors combined make for a perfect storm where the organization overpays even as it jeopardizes governance, security, and budget.

To sum up, enterprises are up against the following cloud computing challenges (see Figure 1):

Figure 1: Key Challenges for Managing Cloud Computing

Yet organizations can — and, Amalgam Insights contends, must — take steps to overcome these circumstances. And with global recession fears mounting, the impetus to do so comes as more pressing than ever.

In the third blog in this series, Amalgam Insights will go deep into the value organizations stand to gain by partnering with a proven cloud management and optimization provider.

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 instant download. 


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An Important Side Note on FinOps and Cloud Economics

Organizations sometimes describe the job of cloud cost management as a “FinOps” role (an abbreviation of “Financial Operations” or “Financial Cloud Operations”) or as a Cloud Economics position. Amalgam Insights finds that there is confusion about these terms. Here’s why.

The common-sense definition of Financial Operations belongs to the Finance team responsible for financial close, budgeting, planning, treasury, tax, and accounting. Meanwhile, the concept of “economics” typically applies to the ecosystem of the production and consumption of value. In many cases, that goes beyond the scope of a standard “cloud economics” role, which focuses on cloud optimization and cost management.

However, in practice, these terms of FinOps and Cloud Economics are often used interchangeably to refer to managing costs, as well as inventory and governance. This is misleading on a variety of levels. The appropriation of “FinOps” to be cloud-specific is confusing enough, especially since a separate “FinOps” is starting to emerge for financial applications used to assist with planning, budgeting, close, consolidation, treasury management, and other financial tasks requiring some strategy, workflow, or collaboration to complete. The Cloud Economics term is a challenge for a different reason: it is an inaccurate term as economics should refer to the financial and business value associated with cloud deployments, including sales bookings and support costs at the microeconomic level and the environmental impact and ecosystem costs at the macroeconomic level. Economics, finance, and accounting are three separate concepts that the IT department needs to understand.

Amalgam Insights acknowledges that this is a common occurrence and hopes this note provides clarity for the reader who may find herself already acting as a “cloud economist” or “FinOps practitioner” based on activity around managing cloud costs while perhaps not being familiar with this terminology. The biggest concern Amalgam Insights has with these inaccurate terms is that the use of these terms may lead to the trivialization of these roles as FinOps or cloud economists are typecast as “cost analysts” rather than personnel who understand the business repercussions of cloud on the business as a whole. Cost analysts are a cost center while business analysts who understand revenue root causes are often a profit center.

In this light, what can FinOps and cloud economics personnel do to avoid being pigeonholed? Here’s Amalgam Insights’ advice.

1) Talk to the finance team in charge of organizing and managing IT costs. Somebody at the finance team has to either articulate the value of IT or rolls IT up into general and administrative costs or cost of goods sold. Understand how IT is categorized in your organization, as cloud may be miscategorized.

2) Understand the full lifecycle of cloud costs. This includes vendor sourcing, contract negotiations, optimization, service rationalization, and the security and governance concerns associated with technology vendor selection. Do not be stuck within one small section of Technology Lifecycle Management within a complex spend category such as cloud unless you are seeking to be commoditized over the next few years.

Finally, understand the economics associated with cloud. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is an increasingly important and strategic topic for businesses seeking to improve branding and reduce their risk to any operations that may lead to future concerns. If you want to be associated with economics, understand not just the services and technologies supported but their impacts on the environment and to the service provider. This allows you to be a resource not just for IT, but also for the CFO, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Procurement Officer, and other strategic vendors.

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Cloud Cost Management Part 1: Understanding Challenges to Optimal Cloud Management

Since the start of COVID-19 more than two years ago, cloud computing infrastructure and platform spend categories have collectively increased 48% per year. That makes the related costs both an outlier in IT and a key target for potential expense reduction, especially as a recession — caused by the pandemic — hovers on the horizon.

 All in all, in 2022, global spending on cloud computing — including infrastructure and software — will total more than $350 billion, according to Amalgam Insights. As such, organizations require expert guidance for making the most of their cloud computing environments while, at the same time, trimming unnecessary outlay.

Cloud Computing By the Numbers

Amalgam Insights estimates that organizational investments in cloud computing infrastructure and platform services will continue to increase 25% per year for the rest of this decade. The reasons for shifting to cloud technologies mostly tie to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and concurrent digital transformation and modernization projects that support workforce flexibility.

The reality of that momentum shows in the 48% annual growth of public IaaS and PaaS from 2019 to 2021, based on estimates from Gartner, IDC, Apps Run the World, and Amalgam Insights research that represents a $90 billion increase worldwide.

And a third of that $350 billion total is waste.

Understanding the IT Rule of 30

Amalgam Insights has done the math that demonstrates that unmanaged IT spend categories average 30% waste, due to the inherent lack of governance, sourcing immaturity, and lack of expense visibility. Given that public cloud computing constitutes a spend area covered by the IT Rule of 30, organizations are collectively spending billions of dollars unnecessarily. In the cloud computing world, waste often creeps up due to service duplication, and the unmanaged growth of production and sandbox resources. The combination leads to outsized cloud computing bills ripe for optimization and management.

 Deterrents to Good Cloud Computing Governance

Because cloud computing represents the fastest growing subcategory of technology spend in most businesses, this outlay requires strategic oversight from the finance, IT, revenue, security, and governance departments.

But consider some of the common barriers organizations face:

       Finance and line-of-business executives in charge of budgeting need to understand that cloud computing costs are nuanced and cannot simply be slashed in proportion to the budget as a whole;

       IT must choose and manage platforms, and assign and monitor users and consumption;

       Software development and IT architects need to tag and track resources as cloud computing services are spun up and down;

       Data experts have to ensure that the organizations information within the various cloud resources stays in line with privacy laws such as Europes General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act in Canada.

Finally, we discuss three other important realities that hamstring a cohesive and effective cloud computing management and optimization strategy.

 Ch-ch-ch-Changes

First, cloud vendors tend to create new services rapidly with little to no prior notice — and they retain the right to change billing structures on an ad-hoc basis. For example, Amazon Web Services alone has 226 products across analytics, compute, containerization, database, developer tools, machine learning, networking, security, storage, and a variety of other technical capabilities. The vendor usually adds 20 or more new products every year. 

Even if adjustments benefit end users, they can prove hard to track. That means organizations can have a hard time ensuring that even just a single vendor’s billed costs match actual consumption and contractual terms. Imagine what happens when an organization relies on multiple cloud providers.

Inconsistency

Along those lines, the second challenge lies in using the data delivered by the cloud providers themselves. While the information — which can comprise usage, expenses, taxes, permissions, and consumption by user for each product — is vital, Amalgam Insights’ big caveat is that cloud computing vendors do not usually maintain consistent detail. This makes defining services ownership and usage — especially across specific projects and employees — difficult. After that, the burden of accurate project and departmental tracking falls on how well the organization has set up internal tags and tracking — typically a hit-or-miss proposition.

Siloes

The third is that when organizations institute cloud computing management and optimization, they tend to do so through software and managed services specific to the various components of cloud computing — think items including infrastructure (e.g. virtualized desktops, containerized workloads), software/applications, storage, compute, and networking. Such a siloed approach contributes to ongoing lack of visibility and communication among decision-makers, and sets the stage for less-than-optimal stewardship of the cloud environment.

Overall, these financial, operational, and governance requirements create complexity that can quickly morph into a full-time job for a software developer, cloud architect, or data manager. And each of these professionals is likely being paid handsomely to help grow the company — not track inventories, bills, and service orders. (Learn more in our companion piece, “An Important Side Note on FinOps and Cloud Economics)

Tackling the Cloud Computing Management and Optimization Problem

For the most part, organizations recognize the need to better
manage their cloud computing environments. The impetus to do so increases amid
the threat of a global recession. Amalgam Insights contends that organizations — especially those using hybrid clouds or multiple public clouds — can gain significant
value, even during a worldwide economic slowdown, by using third-party
management tools. These platforms (and in many instances, associated consulting
and managed services) offer the cleanest insight into the cloud environment
while simultaneously assuring the wisest spending and delivery of more
sophisticated services to corporate and external clients.

In Part 2 of this series, Amalgam Insights will discuss the reasons to turn to a third-party cloud computing management and optimization partner, versus trying to go it alone and/or rely on vendor-generated data.

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.

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August 26: From BI to AI (Alteryx, BigID, Domino, Micro Focus, OpenText, Salesforce, SAS, SingleStore, Sisu, Snowflake, Zilliz)

Funding and Financials

Salesforce Announces Q2 2023 Fiscal Results 

Salesforce released its Q2 2023 financial report on August 24. Revenues were up 22% year over year, at $7.72B for the quarter. Despite the improvement in revenues, CRM stock dropped over 6% after the report was released.

Snowflake Reports Q2 2023 Financial Results

Snowflake released their Q2 2023 fiscal results the same day as Salesforce. Snowflake revenues were up 83% year over year, with $497.2M in total revenue for the quarter. These numbers were strong enough SNOW jumped nearly 20% at the opening bell, though Snowflake stock is currently trading at just below $200/share, about half of its previous peak value.

Vector Database Company Zilliz Raises Additional $60 Million in Series B Extension

 Zilliz, a vector database company, raised an additional $60M in funding in an extension to its earlier $43B Series B round. Prosperity7 Ventures led the extension, with participation from 5Y Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Temasek’s Pavillion Capital, and Yunqi Capital. Zilliz will use the additional funding to continue expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams, once they’ve opened their new Silicon Valley HQ.

Launches and Updates

Alteryx Releases Alteryx Server-FIPS for Public Sector Analytics 

Following up on their May release of Alteryx Designer-FIPS, Alteryx announced this week the launch of Alteryx Server-FIPS. Alteryx’s FIPS releases are compatible with the Federal Information Processing Standards  for data and computer security, which apply to public sector computing environments that require high-quality data encryption. Alteryx Server-FIPS will allow analyst teams within public sector organizations to collaborate on analytic workflows, macros, and apps.

BigID Debuts Auto-Classification for Data Governance

Data intelligence platform BigID announced auto-classification capabilities for data governance and management. Organizations will be able to automatically classify and tag data for governance purposes, even in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. 

Domino Data Lab Obtains ISO 27001:2013 Certification

On August 24, Domino Data Lab announced that they had achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification. ISO 27001:2013 standards require following strict rules around data security, risk management, continuous monitoring and improvement, and personnel training to assure end-to-end security around accessing and using sensitive data in machine learning models.

Incorta Adds Component SDK, Marketplace, Additional Data Apps 

Incorta announced new data applications for a number of platforms, opening up Incorta capabilities to new types of data. The new data apps include Workday (Workforce and Compensation), SAP ECC (Financials and Supply Chain), and Oracle EBS and Cloud ERP (Financials and Supply Chain, and Human Capital Management). Incorta also debuted the Incorta Marketplace, allowing Incorta users to share analytic content in the form of additional data apps, as well as custom visualizations and dashboard controls. Finally, Incorta also released a component SDK that developers can use to create new data connectors beyond the library of already-existing ones.

Sisu Expands Capabilities with Automated Analytics 

Sisu Data has added new features to its Sisu Decision Intelligence Engine. With these new features, Sisu customers will be able to automatically detect trends and anomalies in data, and augment analytics workflows with “automated analytics” to track and understand how and why metrics change and predict the future impact of such changes.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

OpenText to Acquire Micro Focus International PLC

On August 25, OpenText announced its intent to acquire British software and IT firm Micro Focus at £5.32 per share, implying an estimated total value for Micro Focus around $6B. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2023. From our BI to AI perspective, this acquisition helps augment OpenText’s existing analytics capabilities through Micro Focus’ Vertica analytics platform, in addition to a broad set of capabilities available in the rest of Micro Focus’ broad portfolio.

SAS Integrates Viya with SingleStore

Analytics firm SAS and cloud database SingleStore have announced an integration between SAS Viya and SingleStore as part of their ongoing partnership. SAS Viya with SingleStore will allow SAS analytics and AI services to be used on data stored in SingleStore.

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August 19: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Collibra, Cloudera, data.world, Explo, integrate.ai, InterSystems, Omni)

Funding and Financials

Customer-Facing Analytics Solution Explo Raises $12M Series A 

Customer-facing analytics solution Explo has raised $12M in a Series A funding round. Craft Ventures led the round, with participation from Amplo VC and Felicis Ventures. Explo will use the funding to further their product roadmap.

Unified BI Platform Omni Emerges from Stealth, Raises $26.9M in Funding

BI platform Omni launched publicly this week with $26.9M in funding. Redpoint led the $17.5M Series A, with participation from First Round and GV. A seed round was raised back in April, led by First Round, with participation from BoxGroup, GV, Quiet Capital, Redpoint, and Scribble Ventures. Omni was founded by Looker alums Colin Zima (Chief Analytics Officer) and Jamie Davidson (former VP of Product), and former Stitch CTO Christopher Merrick. 

Updates and Launches

Cloudera Launches First All-in-One Data Lakehouse Cloud Service 

Cloudera launched Cloudera Data Platform One, an integrated SaaS data lakehous solution. CDP One includes cloud compute, cloud storage, streaming analytics, machine learning, and security under one roof, on private single-tenant cloud infrastructure, with the aim of permitting secure self-service analytics and exploratory data science in the cloud. CDP One is currently available on a limited basis, with wider availability planned for later in 2022.

data.world Announces Eureka Explorer Lineage

Enterprise data catalog data.world debuted Eureka Explorer Lineage this week, a data lineage product built atop data.world’s knowledge graph. Eureka Explorer Lineage shows the flow of data from source to analysis, revealing where data is sourced, where it’s aggregated, and whether or not it has been transformed at any point. Explorer Lineage also uses the knowledge graph to map data to business concepts, making it easier for nontechnical team members to understand what their data is saying.

integrate.ai Releases Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning and Analytics Platform

SaaS company integrate.ai debuted its machine learning and analytics platform, focused on preserving the security and privacy of sensitive data while still allowing machine learning and analytics capabilities to be performed. Machine learning traditionally requires centralizing and aggregating data sources, which may not be possible with certain types of data. integrate.ai works via federated machine learning, which allows data to remain distributed while being analyzed, and the aggregated end results maintain the privacy of the original data.

InterSystems Announces Numerous Updates to IRIS

InterSystems announced new releases for its data platform IRIS. The additions of Embedded Python and IntegratedML to IRIS will accelerate and simplify creating smart data fabrics. InterSystems also announced better collaboration facilities for data analysts and data scientists to make their work usable by each other without having to move the underlying data at any point in the process. Improvements to Adaptive Analytics were also released, allowing business users to more easily explore data ad hoc.  Finally, InterSystems announced a partnership with data intelligence platform Collibra, allowing customers to take advantage of Collibra’s data governance, privacy, and quality capabilities.

Hiring

Alteryx Names Steve Brodrick as Chief Transformation Officer | Alteryx

Steve Brodrick joined Alteryx this week as their Chief Transformation Officer. Brodrick comes to Alteryx from Stanley Black and Decker, where he focused on financial and transformation efforts over the last 20 years. Brodrick will report directly to Alteryx President and CRO Paula Hansen

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Sync Computing Raises $15.5M A Round to Provide Business Governance to Data Infrastructure

On August 16, 2022, Sync Computing, an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost Management, announced a $15.5 million round of equity and debt financing led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from prior investors The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures, and National Grid Partners. Sync Computing has already differentiated itself in the cloud infrastructure optimization market for its capabilities to automate the provisioning and orchestration of cloud both from a cost and runtime perspective based on a proprietary mathematical approach (an oscillator-based Ising machine for those seeking the primary technical inspiration used in Sync applied to optimizing data pipelines) covered in our Cloud Cost Management SmartList. From a business perspective, this means two things: cost management and improved performance.

Amalgam Insights believes that this funding round will help Sync Computing to further enhance its differentiation in the current cloud cost and infrastructure optimization markets as data and machine learning companies seek a starting point to help them to identify cost and performance opportunities, provide options to improve either the cost-basis or revenue-enhancing aspects of infrastructure, and implement these capabilities. This announcement included the general availability announcement of an Apache Spark Autotuner, which will allow data engineers to broadly optimize data environments. We also believe that this funding will help Sync Computing to accelerate the roadmap items described in our SmartList, including enhanced support for both their Autotuner and Orchestrator products to support Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure as well as Kubernetes cluster management support and support for PyTorch and TensorFlow.

As a side note, Amalgam Insights believes this construction of financing is a smart move as it reduces the amount of equity that Sync Computing’s founders need to give up in order to obtain the cash they are receiving to run the company. If the company grows as expected, the interest rate associated with debt will be less than the cost of equity given up in the long run. Given the nature of Sync Computing’s offering at a time when enterprises are seeking to rationalize and optimize their big data and machine learning environments, this bet seems wise.

The  involvement of Costanoa Ventures is significant as it has emerged as a top-tier venture capital firm for supporting data and machine learning infrastructure management  with portfolio investments including Alation, Bigeye, and Pepperdata as well as a variety of AI-enabled applications ranging from 6sense to Intacct to Lex Machina, all of which have been acquired.

With this round of funding, Amalgam Insights believes Sync Computing is well-positioned to continue on its currently unique path of supporting the combination of recommenations, automated configuration, cost management, and performance optimization without requiring additional investment in headcount or skills.

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August 12: From BI to AI (Anaconda, Dropbase, Mighty Canary, Oracle, Verta)

Funding

Dropbase Reveals $1.75M Funding Round
Data management company Dropbase announced that they had raised a $1.75M venture funding round this week. Gradient Ventures led the round, with additional participation from Bragiel Brothers, Liquid 2 Ventures, Unpopular Ventures, Y Combinator, and additional angel investors. The funds will be used to XYZ. Dropbase allows users to drag and drop a simple CSV file into a Postgres database while addressing typical dirty data issues on the fly.

Launches and Updates

Mighty Canary Introduces “Trustmark” for Realtime Data
Data trust company Mighty Canary introduced the concept of a “trustmark” this week. Trustmarks report on the state of existing data pipelines, noting the freshness of realtime data on a dashboard. This allows business users to better understand – and trust – that the data on their dashboards is accurate and timely, and note when there are relevant issues. Mighty Canary is currently in beta.

Verta Adds Enterprise-Focused Capabilities to its MLOps Platform
MLOps platform Verta added several new integrations to its MLOps platform. Key new capabilities include support for Active Directory and OAuth, enabling single sign-on (SSO) and automating user provisioning and management; Python Package Index (PyPi =) integration, allowing teams to securely share Python packages and dependencies within their organization; Datadog integration, which will send operational and endpoint metrics from Verta to Datadog so that teams have better visibility into their machine learning models; Apache Kafka integration for simple scalable deployment; and finally, vulnerability scanning throughout the machine learning lifecycle to improve model security.

Partnerships

Anaconda Announces Strategic Cloud Partnership with Oracle
On August 9, Anaconda announced a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Anaconda will embed its repository of open source Python and R packages within OCI’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Services., giving customers access to Anaconda without requiring a separate license.

Anaconda Announces Strategic Cloud Partnership with Oracle
On August 9, Anaconda announced a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Anaconda will embed its repository of open source Python and R packages within OCI’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Services., giving customers access to Anaconda without requiring a separate license.