Category: Technology Expense Management

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Zluri Raises a $20 Million Series B Round: Is it Enough for the Crowded SaaS Management Market?

Companies Mentioned:

Accel, Apptio, Atlassian Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Baird Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, BetterCloud, Blissfully, Calero, Canaan Partners, Cleanshelf, Cloudability, Coupa Ventures, Craft Ventures, e.ventures, Endiya Partners, Entrée Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Founder Collective, F-Prime Capital, Global Founders Capital, Greycroft, High Alpha, Intello, IVP, Kalaari Capital, LeanIX, MassMutual Ventures, Menlo Ventures, New Amsterdam Growth Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Okta Ventures, Productiv, SailPoint, Scopus Capital, Shine, SoftBank, Sound Ventures, Sozo Ventures, Spring Lake Equity Partners, Tangoe, Tiger Global, Tropic, Uncork Capital, Vendr, Vista Equity Partners, Warburg Pincus, Wing Venture Capital, Y Combinator, Zluri, Zylo

Key Stakeholders:
Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Finance and Accounts Payable Directors and Managers, Procurement Directors, Technology Expense Directors and Managers, FinOps Directors and Managers, IT Architects, Vice President/Director/Manager of IT Operations, Product Managers, IT Sourcing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers, SaaS Expense Managers, Sales Operations Managers, Marketing Operations Managers.

Why It Matters:
SaaS (Software as a Service) Operations is a hot market where vendors have collectively received over $1 billion in investments. End user organizations are seeking to manage $250 billion in annual spend associated with SaaS subscriptions, which can often be scattered over 1,000 apps in large multi-national enterprises. Even a relatively small 500-person organization can expect to have over 200 apps under management. This combination of vendor sprawl, shadow IT, and governance challenges are quickly forcing businesses to realize that they require SaaS governance across sourcing, spend, access, inventory, and security. With this $20 million Series B round, Zluri enters this fray in earnest in making its automation platform more accessible to the SaaS management market.

Top Takeaway:
Zluri is an Amalgam Insights recommended vendor for automating service orders, managing onboarding and offboarding, monitoring app usage, and managing SaaS spend. It fills multiple core responsibilities within the Amalgam Insights Technology Lifecycle Management relative to SaaS and should be considered by companies seeking to support SaaS environments with over $1 million in total annual spend or with over 100 separate app vendors under management.

Zluri Raises a $20 Million Series B Round

On July 13, 2023, Zluri, a SaaS operations platform, announced a $20 million Series B round headed by Lightspeed with additional participation from existing investors including MassMutual Ventures, Endiya Partners, and Kalaari Capital.

This funding occurs in context of a breadth of investment in managing the operations and procurement of SaaS including the following funding investments and product launches:

  • Feb 2023 – Zylo raises a $5 million round on top of a $31 million Series C round in December 2022.
    Investors include: Baird Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Coupa Ventures, High Alpha, Menlo Ventures, Spring Lake Equity Partners,
  • November 2022 – Tangoe announces addition of SaaS management to TangoeOne platform
  • June 2022 – BetterCloud, a SaaS management firm, sells a majority stake to Vista Equity Partners after raising $187 milion over six rounds.
    Previous Investors included: Warburg Pincus, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, e.ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Greycroft, New Amsterdam Growth Capital
  • June 2022 – Vendr raises $150M Series B to support its SaaS buying platform
    Investors include Craft Venturs, SoftBank, Sozo Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Sound Ventures, Tiger Global, Y Combinator
  • April 2022 – Calero (technology expense management vendor managing over $25 billion in tech spend) announces a SaaS expense management solution
  • February 2022 – Vendr acquires Blissfully to add cost management and data offerings.
  • February 2022 – Tropic raises $40M Series B from Insight Partners to improve SaaS procurement, a round that occured four months after a Series A round from Canaan Partners, Founder Collective and Shine
  • February 2022 – Torii raises a $50M Series B round led by Tiger Global
    Investors include Tiger Global, Entree Capital, Global Founders Capital, Scopus Capital, Uncork Capital, and Wing Venture Capital
  • March 2021 – Enterprise Architcture Management company LeanIX acquires Cleanshelf
  • March 2021 – Productiv raises $45M Series C to support SaaS expense management
    Investors include IVP, Accel, Atlassian Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Okta Ventures
  • February 2021- SailPoint acquires Intello for $43 million
  • November 2020 – Apptio (IT financial management and Cloud FinOps provider) announced Cloudability SaaS for SaaS discovery and spend management

Suffice it to say that the SaaS management market is both a hot market and one that requires both funding and a high quality offering to be competitive. Top tier venture capital and private equity firms have made one or more investments in this space already. But at the same time, one of the concerns that Zluri does not have to worry about is that this market is an actual market. One of the biggest concerns an analyst typically has about a new market is whether it is real or not and backed by customers, revenue, and market competitors. The SaaS Management market has proven this to be true, both in the quantity and quality of offerings in place.

This said, does Zluri match up with the vendors at large and does it have a competitive niche in this complex market?

About Zluri

Amalgam Insights has spoken with Zluri executives multiple times in the past couple of years as we have explored SaaS management and SaaSOps as a part of our overall Technology Lifecycle Management umbrella. In doing so, we have found so far that key differentiating points include:
• Workflow automation to support app discovery and orders
• Activity-based insight into SaaS usage and spending
• Identity management to audit access and automate onboarding and offboarding

As one of the newer SaaS management solutions that Amalgam Insights covers, founded in 2020 in Bangalore, Zluri has a software solution that currently lacks legacy technical debt issues and is built with a current and modern user interface. Amalgam Insights finds it interesting that Zluri was founded in India, as India has traditionally been an area that has supported much of the help desk, service order, invoice processing, and optimization work associated with telecom expense and cloud FinOps work on behalf of US-owned companies. This company represents a shift in seeing Indian entrepreneurs directly owning the company while also being close to a significant center of the technology lifecycle management value chain. This location also means that Zluri has some cost structure advantages compared to most of its competitors started either in the United States or Israel. And its focus on automating SaaS-related processes and workflows provides a strong foundation towards providing not only the operational support to manage SaaS, but also the lineage and t that are needed to trace how and when specific changes were made to a SaaS account.

Zluri’s offering is compelling enough to win business even as it faces the competition listed above. Amalgam Insights estimates that Zluri currently has around 250 customers and over 200 employees, which is in line with the recent funding round that was announced. However, the capital raised in this Series B round is obviously necessary to gain market share in the 100 – 5,000 employee mid-market where Zluri has succeeded to this point. Even in today’s era of product-led growth, some level of market visibility is needed to support go-to-market solutions, especially in a market where Amalgam Insights has tracked total investment that approaches $1 billion.

Amalgam Insights believes that, though Zluri has a competitive and differentiated product that matches up well with current trends in automation and workflow management that will align well with the current megatrend of Generative AI, its biggest challenge is currently in market visibility where the other companies that Amalgam Insights has mentioned have all made inroads with enterprise buyers, channel partners, consultants, and industry associations relevant to the buying cycle of SaaS.

Recommendations to the IT Expense Community

First, in seeking a SaaS management solution, Amalgam Insights always recommends thinking about the full Technology Lifecycle that goes across sourcing, procurement, expense management, vendor management, resource optimization, compliance, and security. SaaS management and SaaS operations are currently fragmented markets where it is hard to find a single vendor that is strong in all of these areas.

The Amalgam Insights Model for Technology Lifecycle Management

Second, in managing this SaaS lifecycle, look for automation and for skill sets that may fall outside of your organization’s core management or sourcing skills. SaaS can be a complicated and complex spend category, especially as large multi-billion dollar enterprises can expect to manage 1,000 apps at this point across both formal and “Bring Your Own” expensed apps that may hide in a corporate credit card or a phone bill.

Third, expect to see Zluri show up more frequently in your due diligence of SaaS management solutions. Amalgam Insights currently recommends Zluri as a solution to manage SaaS costs, support service orders and onboarding through native workflow automation, and to support application discovery, especially in disaggregated environments. And in our research, we have found that Zluri is a solution that wins deals in the majority of competitive evaluations that Amalgam Insights has seen, which indicates alignment with current customer needs. With this funding round, Zluri now is prepared to compete for its fair share of opportunities in a market that is both deep in competitors and in demand from enterprises seeking to control over $200 billion in annual SaaS spend.

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IBM Plans to Acquire IT Financial Management Leader Apptio: Consequences for the Enterprise IT Market

On June 26, 2023, IBM announced its intention to acquire IT Financial Management vendor Apptio for 4.6 billion dollars. This acquisition is intended to support IBM’s ability to support IT automation and business value documentation. With this acquisition comes the big question: is this acquisition good for IBM and Apptio customers? Who benefits most from this acquisition?

As an industry analyst who has covered the IT expense management space and first coined the Technology Expense Management and Technology Lifecycle Management terms as evolutions of the IT Asset Management and Telecom Expense Management markets, I’ve been looking at these markets and vendors for the past 15 years. In that time, IBM has gone through a variety of investments in the Technology Lifecycle Management space to manage the assets, projects, and costs associated with IT environments and Apptio has evolved from a nascent startup to a market leader.

When Amalgam Insights is asked “What do you think of IBM’s acquisition of Apptio,” this opinion requires exploring the back story and starting points for consideration as there is much more to this acquisition than simply stating that this is “good” or “bad.” Apptio is a market-leading vendor across IT financial management, SaaS Management, Cloud Cost Management (where Apptio is a current Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor), and Project Management. But there is a multi-decade history leading up to this acquisition, including both IBM’s pursuit of Technology Lifecycle Management solutions and Apptio’s long road to becoming a market leader in IT financial management.

Contextualizing the Acquisition

To understand this acquisition in its full context, let’s explore a partial timeline of the IBM, IBM partner, and Apptio journeys to get to this point:

1996 – IBM purchases Tivoli Systems for $743 million (approximately $1.4 billion in 2023 dollars) to substantially enter the IT asset management and monitoring business. Tivoli goes to become a market standard for IT asset management.

2002 – IBM acquires Rational Software for $2.1 billion to support software development and monitoring.

2007 – Apptio is founded as an IT financial management solution to support the planning, budgeting, and forecasting needs of CIOs and CFOs seeking to better understand their holistic IT ecosystem. At the time, it is seen as a niche capability compared to Tivoli’s broad set of functionalities but is still seen as promising enough to attract Andreessen Horowitz’ attention as their first investment back in 2009.

February 2012 – IBM acquires Emptoris, which includes a leading telecom expense management called Rivermine, to support sourcing, inventory management, and supply chain management as part of its Smarter Commerce initiative.

May 2015 – IBM Divests Rivermine operations, selling off the technology expense management business unit to Tangoe. Tangoe uses the customization of the Rivermine platform to support complex IT expense and payment management environments for large enterprises.

November 2015 – IBM acquires Gravitant, a hybrid cloud brokerage solution used to help companies to purchase cloud computing services across cloud environments. Later renamed IBM Cloud Brokerage, this capability was intended to support IBM’s Global Technology Services unit in supporting multi-cloud and complex enterprise hybrid cloud environments. This acquisition logic ended up being accurate in the long run, but was too early considering that the multi-cloud era is really only beginning now in the 2020s.

December 2018 – HCL purchases a variety of IBM software products for $1.8 billion, including Appscan and BigFix. Although these Rational and Tivoli products provided enterprise value for many years, they eventually became outdated and seen as legacy monitoring products.

January 2019 – Apptio is acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.94 billion. At the time, I thought this was a bargain even though it was a 53% premium to the trading price at the time. At the time, Apptio had gone through a rapid stock price fall due to some public market overreaction and Vista Equity came in with a strong offering that pleased institutional investors. With investments in IT and financial software companies including Bettercloud, JAMF, Trintech, and Vena, Vista Equity was seen as an experienced buyer capable of providing value to Apptio.

May 2019 – Apptio acquires Cloudability, entering the cloud cost management or Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations) space. With this acquisition, Apptio answered one of my long-time criticisms of the vendor, that it did not directly manage IT spend after holding out on directly managing a trillion dollars of enterprise telecom, network, and mobility spend. This transaction put visibility to $9 billion in multi-cloud spend across the Big 3 providers under Apptio’s supervision while maintaining Apptio’s vendor-neutral approach to IT finances.

December 2020 – IT Asset Management vendor Flexera is acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Over the next couple of years, Flexera develops a strong relationship with IBM to support IT Asset Management.

December 2020 – IBM acquires Instana to support observability and Application Performance Management. As real-time continuity, remediation, and observability have become increasingly important for monitoring the health of enterprise IT, this acquisition provides a crucial granular perspective for IBM clients.

February 2021 – Apptio acquires Targetprocess to support agile product and portfolio management. The ability to plan and budget projects and products allows Apptio to support IT at a more granular, contingent, and business-contextual level.

June 2021 – IBM acquires Turbonomic, an application resource, network performance, and cloud resource management solution. With this acquisition, IBM enters the FinOps space. In our 2022 Cloud Cost and Optimization SmartList, we listed IBM Turbonomic as a Distinguished Vendor noting that it focused “on application performance” and that the “software learns from organizations’ actions, so recommendations improve over time.”

October 2022 – Flexera One with IBM Observability aggregates cloud spend across multiple clouds. This offering combined with Flexera One’s status as an IBM partner gives IBM customers an option for multi-cloud spend management and the ability to purchase cost optimization based on cloud spend.

June 2023 – We come back to the present day, when IBM has agreed to purchase Apptio. So, now we are seeing a trend where IBM has invested in IT management solutions over the past couple of decades but has struggled to maintain market-leading status in those applications over time for a variety of reasons: market timing, market shifts, strategic positioning.

Concerns and Considerations

What is happening here? The problem isn’t that IBM is targeting bad companies, as IBM has consistently chosen top-tier companies and strong enterprise-grade solutions. This trend continues with Apptio, which has managed over 450 billion dollars in IT spend and provides a statistically significant lens for IT spend trends across a wide variety of vertical trends and geographies. From an acquisition perspective, Apptio makes perfect sense as a market leading solution executing on sales, marketing, and targeted inorganic growth to provide financial visibility and operational automation across global IT departments.

And the problem is not a lack of interest, as IBM has consistently targeted IT sourcing, expense, and performance management solutions with some success. IBM usually knows what it is trying to accomplish in purchasing solutions (with the exception of the missed Rivermine opportunity) and has done a good job of identifying where it needs to go next. As an example, IBM was early, perhaps too early, in pursuing multi-cloud brokerage services but in retrospect there is no doubt that multi-cloud management was the future of IT.

Based on my long market perspective of the Technology Lifecycle Management market, I think IBM has run into two main issues in this market: market size and partnership opportunities.

First, look at market size. This Technology Lifecycle Management market simply has not traditionally been an extremely large multi-billion dollar market on the scale of analytics, mainframes, or services. ITFM and related IT cost management services will always struggle to be much larger than a couple of billion dollars in revenue, as proven by market leaders across IT finance and cost such as Apptio, Tangoe, Calero, Zylo, Cass Information Systems, Flexera, Snow Software, CloudHealth (now VMware Aria), and Spot by NetApp. All of these solutions have grown to the point of managing billions of dollars, but none of these standalone businesses or business units have come close to reaching a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. This is not an issue, other than that it is traditionally hard for behemoth global enterprises with $100 billion+ in annual revenue expectations to be fully committed to businesses of this size without trying to turn them into “larger” solutions that often lose focus.

A second issue is that IBM has a lot of internal pressure to play nicely with partners. The recent Flexera One partnership announcements are a good example where Flexera has quickly emerged as a strong partner to support IT asset management and multi-cloud cost management challenges and now will have to be rationalized in context of the capabilities that Apptio brings to market once this acquisition is completed. But when IBM has made commitments and plans to build significant services practices around a large partnership, it can be difficult to shift away from those plans no matter how significant the acquisition is. The challenge here is that even if the direct software revenue may pale in comparison to the services wrapped around it, the service revenue is still dependent on the quality of software used to provide services.

And despite any internal concerns about these issues, this is not a deal that Apptio and Vista Equity could refuse. The basic math here of adding $2.66 billion in market value in 4 and a half years, or roughly $600 million per year (minus the cost of acquisitions) is a no-brainer decision. Anyone who did not seriously consider this transaction would be considered negligent.

In addition, there are good reasons for Apptio to join a larger organization. There are limits to the organic development that Apptio can pursue across the Technology Lifecycle Management cycle across sourcing, observability, contingent resources and services, continuity planning, and MACH (Microservices, APIs, Cloud-Native, Headless) architecture support compared to what IBM (including Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Consulting) can provide. And IBM is obviously still a core provider when it comes to global IT support with a vested interest in helping global enterprises and highly regulated organizations with their IT planning capabilities.

Recommendations

So, what does this mean for IBM and Apptio customers? This is a nuanced decision where every current client will have specific exceptions associated with the customization of their IT portfolio. But here are some general starting points that we are providing as guidelines to consider this transaction.

For IBM: this is an acquisition where IBM is making a good decision, but success is not guaranteed just because of choosing the right vendor in the right space. There will be additional work needed to rationalize Apptio’s portfolio in light of how Turbonomic goes to market and how the Flexera One  partnership is currently structured, just as a starting point. Amalgam Insights hopes that Apptio will be the umbrella brand for IT oversight in the near future as IBM Rational, IBM Tivoli, and IBM Lotus served as strong brands and focal points. IBM already has a variety of cloud and AIOps capabilities across Turbonomic, Instana, and Red Hat Openshift management tools for Apptio to serve both a FinOps and CloudOps hub as well as a strong go-to-market brand.

There is room for mutual success in this vision, as Flexera One’s ITAM capabilities are outside the scope of Apptio’s core concerns. This does likely mean that Flexera’s cloud cost capabilities will be shelved in favor of Apptio Cloudability and this needs to be a commitment. IBM needs to be a bit more greedy when it comes to supporting its direct software products than it traditionally has been over the last decade in maintaining the best-in-breed capabilities that Apptio is bringing to market, as the talent and vision of the current Apptio team is a significant portion of the value being acquired. IBM can be a challenging environment for software solutions, as every decision is seen through a multitude of lenses with the goal of finding some level of consensus across a variety of conflicting stakeholders. As this balance is sought, Amalgam Insights hopes that IBM focuses on building its direct software business and keeping Apptio’s finance, cost, and project management capabilities at a market-leadership level that will be championed by customers and analysts, even if this comes at the cost of growing partnerships. It can be easy for IBM software solutions to get the short shrift as its direct revenue can sometimes pale in comparison to larger services contracts, but the newest generation of IT to support new data stacks, hybrid cloud, and AI-enabled decisions and generative assets is in its infancy and IBM has acquired both solutions and a product and service team prepared to take this challenge head-on.

For Apptio: The past five years have been a strong validation of the continued opportunities that exist in IT Financial Management across hybrid cloud, software, and project management. There are still massive opportunities in contingent labor and traditional telecom and data center cost management markets as well as the opportunity to get more granular with API, transactional logs, and technological behavior that can be used to align the cost, budget, and health of the IT ecosystem. Amalgam Insights hopes that Apptio is treated similarly to Red Hat as a growth engine for the company and that Apptio has the operational flexibility to continue operating on its current path, but with more ambition matching the scale of IBM’s technology relationships and goals of solving the world’s biggest challenges.

For Apptio customers: You are working with a market leader in some area of IT finance or multi-vendor public cloud management and should hold fast on demands to retain the tech and support structure currently in place. As you move to IBM contractual terms, make sure that Apptio-related service terms, commitments, and responsibilities stay in place. This is an area where Amalgam Insights expects that the Technology Business Council will prove useful as a collective voice of executive demands to drive future Apptio development and evolution. Be aware that there are additional stakeholders at the table when it comes to the future of Apptio and it will be increasingly important for direct Apptio customers to maintain and increase demands in light of the increased complexity that will inevitably become part of the management of Apptio.

For IBM customers: You are likely already an Apptio customer based on Apptio’s current client base: there was a lot of overlap and synergy between the customer bases. But if not, this is a good time to evaluate Apptio as part of the overall IBM relationship as a dedicated solution for finance and cost management. In doing so, get IBM executive commitment regarding core features and functionality that will be strategically important for aligning IT activity to business growth. To deal with the cliches that every company is now a “software company” or a “data-driven company,” companies must have strong financial controls over the technology components that drive corporate change. At the same time, it is important to maintain a best-in-breed approach rather than be locked into an aging ERP-like experience as many companies experienced over the past decade.

These considerations are all a starting point for how to take action as IBM moves towards acquiring Apptio. Amalgam Insights expects there should be little to no concern with the acquisition moving forward as it is both mutually beneficial to all parties and lacks any sort of monopoly or antitrust issue that has slowed down larger acquisitions.

If you are seeking additional guidance to more granular aspects of considering Apptio, Flexera, IBM Turbonomic or other vendors in the IT finance, cloud FinOps, SaaS Management, or other related Technology Lifecycle Management topics, please feel free to contact Amalgam Insights to schedule an inquiry or to schedule briefing time.

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14 Key Trends for Surviving 2023 as an IT Executive

2023 is going to be a tough year for anybody managing technology. As we face the repercussions of inflation and high interest rates and the bubble of tech starts to be burst, we are seeing a combination of hiring freezes, increased focus on core business activities and the hoary request to “do more with less.”

Behind the cliche of doing more with less is the need to actually become more efficient with tech usage. This means adopting a FinOps (Financial Operations) strategy to cloud to go with your existing Telecom FinOps (aka Telecom expense) and SaaS FinOps (aka SaaS Management) strategies. And it means being prepared for new spend category challenges as companies will need to invest in technology to get work done at a time when it is harder to hire the right person at the right time. Here is a quick preview of our predictions.

 

14 Key Predictions for the IT Executive in 2023

To get the details on each of these trends and predictions and understand why they matter in 2023, download this report at no cost by filling out this quick form to join our low-volume bi-monthly mailing list. (Note: If you do not wish to join our mailing list, you can also purchase a personal license for this report.)

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Why Companies Will Be Tempted to Repeat the Southwest Airlines Debacle in 2023

The biggest US-based travel story at the end of 2022 was the absolute collapse of Southwest Airlines. The United States was hit by a sudden cold snap just as Christmas approached, leading to a massive travel delay across almost all travel modes including airlines, trains, and road-based transit. However, after a couple of days, most US-domestic airlines seemed to have recovered with the exception of Southwest, which suddenly and unexpectedly canceled nearly all of its flights in the last week of 2022, just as people were traveling from or to locations for Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, and other holidays. The timing was horrible and inexplicable. And with little to no official explanation, travelers stranded across the country could only guess whether this was due to an unannounced strike. Were there problems with Southwest’s airplane fleet? Were there problems with a specific airport?

It turns out that the problem was with Southwest’s internal scheduling tool, an in-house software application built in the 1990s and held together over the years as Southwest roughly doubled in size across passengers, planes, trips, employees, and number of destinations supported. This complexity ended up being especially challenging because Southwest’s model as a regional airline meant that it did not use a central hub as most other large airlines in the United States use. Rather, each plane flies from point to point leading to a combination of possibilities that grew exponentially rather than linearly. Although Southwest does not fly every plane from each location to every other location, the complexity of operations from roughly 45 locations in the late 1990s to roughly 100 domestic locations today is not a doubling of complexity but more along the lines of N*(N-1)/2, as long-time analytic advisor Neil Raden pointed out. This means the complexity increase is more akin to (45*44/2) = 990 vs. (100*99/2) = 4950. This level of complexity is multiplied by the challenges of organizing the thousands of pilots and flight attendants traveling from point to point every day.

The orders of magnitude in complexity associated with this scheduling system had already been strained in previous years but met a critical breaking point at the end of 2022 due to a lack of investment and modernization. This failure is a textbook example of the concept of “technical debt.”

Technical debt is often described as a concept that is difficult to articulate for a business audience, but the concept is actually very straightforward from a business perspective. Just as with financial debt, which must be paid back with interest or risk a default that threatens business assets, technical debt is an act of borrowing against the future. Like financial debt, technical debt either requires future investment (the “interest”) to fix the technology over time or to accept that the technology will fail (“default”) and lead to breaking down any processes dependent on the technology.

The lessons from this breakdown are straightforward but are potentially challenging to follow in 2023, a year where companies will be tempted to cut costs by any means possible.

Ensure that executive stakeholders are clear both on the concept of technical debt and the labor associated with current technical debt. It may not be possible to put an exact dollar amount on the technical debt that currently exists in the organization, but it should be possible to provide some guidance on the current labor and resources assigned to managing outdated technology as well as the potential points of failure associated with, say, being unable to find a FORTRAN developer quickly or the use of applications no longer supported by a vendor or by in-house developers.

Document every technology associated with each mission-critical process. With the cliché that “every company is a technology company” having been fully realized in today’s web, mobile, and automated world, IT’s job is to provide proactive guidance on the hardware, software, and skills that must either be supported or upgraded. The business value propositions of IT asset and service management are unlocked when assets are specifically aligned to business dependencies, projects, and processes.

Identify technologies where business growth lead to exponential technology demand. Southwest’s scheduling system needed to grow exponentially and eventually failed based on its legacy design. Look at the mathematics associated with key processes to see if growth is logarithmic, linear, exponential, or unpredictable. Simply assuming that a process grows linearly with revenue, employee growth, or business traffic can be a job-ending mistake.

Ensure that legacy technologies have the capacity to support forecasted business complexity or business growth. Any time technology growth needs to expand faster than overall IT spend or overall operational spend, it should serve as a warning sign to either change the technological approach or to invest in the necessary capacity.

We face a challenging year as inflation, foreign currency challenges, geopolitical issues, and supply chain bottlenecks still threaten the spectre of recession. But as executives seek to cut costs, Southwest serves as a reminder that businesses must still futureproof their technology approaches, evaluate the scalability of their processes, and invest in service delivery commensurate with their brand promise or risk lasting revenue and market capitalization losses.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: IBM Turbonomic

Amalgam Insights continues to present its list of Distinguished Vendors for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. This matters because analysts assessed nearly 30 providers for this effort; only a third were able to demonstrate genuine differentiators and approaches that satisfied Amalgam Insights’ requirements for achieving Distinguished Vendor status. To that point, we already have posted profiles on SADA, Spot by NetApp, Apptio Cloudability, Yotascale, Kion, and CAST AI . We next discuss IBM Turbonomic.

WHY IBM TURBONOMIC FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Focus on application performance, which leads to savings
  • Platform configuration is automated, saving IT time and effort during deployment
  • Software learns from organizations’ actions, so recommendations improve over time

ABOUT IBM TURBONOMIC

IBM Turbonomic is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 2009, Turbonomic was acquired by IBM in 2021. IBM Turbonomic now acts as Big Blue’s solution to ensure application performance and governance across cloud environments, including public and private. Turbonomic has two offices in the United States — its headquarters in Boston and a satellite location in Newark, Delaware — as well as one in the UK and another in Canada. IBM does not publicly disclose how many Turbonomic employees it has, nor does it break out Turbonomic annual revenue or provide customer retention rates.

In terms of cloud spend under management, Turbonomic states that it does not track the amount of money its clients spend on cloud computing. Turbonomic serves Fortune 2000 customers across industries including finance, insurance, and healthcare. Turbonomic is typically considered by organizations that have at least 1,000 cloud instances or virtual machines; many support tens of thousands.

IBM TURBONOMIC’S OFFERING

IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management targets application performance and governance throughout an organization’s cloud environment, which can include public cloud (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud), private cloud (IBM, VMware), and multi-cloud environments.

The platform optimizes cloud computing, storage, database as a service, reserved instances, and Kubernetes, but does not currently address spot instances). Furthermore, it optimizes and scales based on IOPs (input/output), reservations, and discounts. Overall, IBM Turbonomic aims to ensure spend aligns to applications, preventing cost overruns and keeping applications performing optimally. While Turbonomic mainly serves IT users, Turbonomic recently teamed with Flexera to add a detailed cost-reporting module that appeals to Financial Operations (FinOps) experts.

IBM Turbonomic charges for its cloud application optimization software based on the number of resources under management. Rather than offering individual add-on capabilities, IBM Turbonomic lets clients choose more advanced capabilities by buying different licensing tiers associated with integrations to other software and processes such as IT service management, orchestrators, and application performance management. IBM Turbonomic includes technical support with all tiers. IBM Turbonomic and its third-party channel partners offer professional services as needed.

IBM Turbonomic states that its top differentiator originates from artificial intelligence that matches application demand to underlying infrastructure supply at every layer of the stack continuously in real-time with automatable resourcing decisions. As more organizations use IBM Turbonomic, the automated recommendations provided to all of its customers improve. Cloud administrators gain insight into suggested actions, such as investments to enhance performance and save money.

IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management is delivered as software-as-a-service. It works across public, private, containerized, and bare metal cloud environments. IBM Turbonomic’s reference customers include Providence Health, which has 120,000 employees; Litehouse Foods, which makes salad dressing, cheese, and other foods; and apparel maker Carhartt.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

IBM Turbonomic mainly competes against organizations’ in-house spreadsheets and mix of tools that are specific to the technologies in use. In these cases, IBM Turbonomic finds that organizations are over-provisioning cloud computing resources in the hopes of mitigating risk. Therefore, they are spending too much and only addressing application performance when something goes wrong.

IBM Turbonomic also often faces VMware CloudHealth in its prospective deals.

IBM Turbonomic states that it draws customers because of automation and recommendations that tend to result in the following business outcomes:

  • Reduction of public cloud spend by 30%
  • Increase in team productivity by 35%
  • Improvement of application performance by 20%
  • Increase in speed to market by 40%

IBM TURBONOMIC’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

IBM Turbonomic keeps its roadmap private, so details about upcoming enhancements are not public. However, Amalgam Insights believes that IBM Turbonomic will pursue improvements in sustainability reporting and GitOps resizing in the near future, and may soon pursue a deeper relationship with Microsoft Azure, given that three of these areas are of interest to IBM Turbonomic’s current client base.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations with a minimum of 1,000 cloud instances or virtual machines, and residing within the Fortune 2000, consider IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management.

Because the platform automatically configures during deployment, provides ongoing recommendations for application and cloud-configuration improvement, and continues to learn from users’ actions, organizations can observe how cloud environments are continuously optimized. This allows IT teams to support cloud consumption needs while also ensuring the organization does not overpay or underresource. In addition, FinOps professionals gain the information they need to track and budget digital transformation efforts without burdening their IT counterparts.

Combined, these capabilities are critical to organizations’ goals of delivering stewardship over their cloud environments while maintaining fiscal responsibility that best serves shareholders, investors, and staff.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: CAST AI

Cast AI - Amalgam Insights' 2022 Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost Management

Managing cloud infrastructure is no easy task, especially when containers such as Kubernetes come into play. In our ongoing effort to help organizations understand what they need to do to make the most of their cloud environments, Amalgam Insights this year briefed with a number of management and optimization vendors. We continue to publish our findings, which include analyst guidance complete with a series of vendor profiles. This installment focuses on CAST AI, a company that takes a different approach to cloud cost and optimization management by homing in on containers. Read on to learn why that is so important and to understand Amalgam Insights’ resulting recommendations for enterprises.

WHY CAST AI FOR COST CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Optimizes Kubernetes containers on a continuous basis
  • Company claims to save users an average of 63% on cloud bills
  • Cost reporting and cluster analysis provided as a free service

ABOUT CAST AI

CAST AI is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Founded in 2019, Miami-headquartered CAST AI employs 60 people in Florida and Lithuania. It raised $10 million in Series A funding in fall of 2021, following its $7.7 million seed round in late 2020. CAST AI does not look for a specific customer size; some of its users have fewer than two dozen virtual machines, while others run thousands. The privately held firm does not disclose annual revenue or how much cloud spend it manages.

CAST AI’S OFFERING

CAST AI automates and optimizes Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service, kOps running on AWS, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Cloud Platform Google Kubernetes Service as well as Kubernetes clusters running directly on CAST AI.

Cast AI users — who typically are DevOps (Development Operations) experts — may run cost reporting that includes cluster analysis and recommendations. FinOps (Financial Operations) professionals can take the reporting results and incorporate them into their practices.

The CAST AI engine goes beyond cost reporting to rearrange Kubernetes environments for the most effective outcomes. To do this, CAST AI connects to a specified app, then runs a script that installs agents to collect information about the app. After that, a report pops up that can provide recommendations for reducing the number of Kubernetes machines or changing to a different compute platform with less memory, all to cut down on cost.

If a user accepts CAST AI’s recommendations, he or she can click a button to optimize the environment in real time. This button sets off a continuous optimization function to give orders to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to rearrange itself, such as autoscaling in real time and rebalancing clusters. Users set their desired automation and alerting thresholds. CAST AI pings the app every 15 seconds and produces an hourly graph. CAST AI claims its users save an average of 63% on their cloud bills.

Pricing for CAST AI varies. CAST AI does not enforce a minimum spend requirement. Rather, it charges by the number of active, optimized CPUs. That starts at $5 per CPU per month and there are tiered discounts from 1-5,000 CPUs, then 5,001-15,000, and so on. Base subscriptions start at $200 per month and go up to $5,000 per month or more, depending on volume discounts. CAST AI provides cost reporting and cluster analysis for free, with no time limits. Users also can buy cost management as a standalone service.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

CAST AI competes most frequently against the Ocean platform from Spot by NetApp in competitive deals. For the most part, though, CAST AI “competes” against DevOps professionals trying to reduce cloud costs manually — a difficult and time-consuming effort.

CAST AI finds that it gains customers because of its engine’s ease of use and ability to make changes in real-time. This further frees DevOps experts to focus on innovative projects.

CAST AI goes to market via its website and, in Europe, Asia, and the United States, also through third-party partners.

CAST AI’s reference customers including La Fourche, a French online retailer of organic products, and ecommerce consultancy Snow Commerce.

CAST AI’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

CAST AI plans to build an air-gapped version of its engine disconnected from the Internet and fully supported within the customer’s internal environment for private cloud users in vertical markets including government and banking. Because CAST AI collects metadata to optimize Kubernetes environments, CAST AI is working on this capability to support more governed industries and organizations.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations with Kubernetes containers try CAST AI’s free trial to understand how the platform might help save money and optimize resources. Although Kubernetes has largely won as the software container of choice in DevOps environments, businesses still have not standardized on strategies to optimize the compute and storage associated with containerized workloads and services. Amalgam Insights believes that Kubernetes optimization should not be a long-term direct responsibility for developers and architects as tools emerge to define the resources that are most appropriate for running containerized applications at any given time.

Organizations worldwide are struggling to control cloud costs, especially as they pursue containerization and cloud refactorization projects associated with digital transformation. Organizations also are cleaning up pandemic-spurred cloud deployments that quickly got out of hand and have proven difficult to keep in line since then. CAST AI’s technology provides an option that DevOps engineers should consider as they seek to tighten and optimize the spend tied to applications containerized in the cloud.

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 Vendor Profile: Kion

Organizations juggling services from the major public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — often struggle to streamline the disparate data that emerge. For businesses and government agencies with a deliberate focus on financial management, Kion can prove a management option to consider.

In Amalgam Insights’ latest profile featuring cloud cost management and optimization vendors, we discuss what Kion does and how the company differs from its competition.

WHY KION FOR CLOUD COST AND OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT

  • Single-platform approach for identity and access management, financial control, and security configuration across the top three public cloud platforms
  • Deep emphasis on compliance checks, including United States federal government compliance
  • Insight into financial management beyond spend savings to include budgeting, forecasting, and compliance

ABOUT KION

Kion is an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. Formerly known as cloudtamer.io, Kion was founded in 2018. While it is headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, Kion takes a remote-first approach to employment, so it has staff across the United States — more than 50 people as of May 2022. Kion reports annual revenue of between $5 million and $10 million and holds a Net Promoter Score of 81. The company serves about 45 clients collectively spending more than $500 million across IaaS and PaaS.

Most of Kion’s customers fall into three segments: government, higher education, and commercial enterprise. For the government and higher education markets, Kion helps agencies manage funding allocations, align spend with appropriations, meet standards, and ensure compliance (e.g. FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-171, CMMC). Enterprises tend to look to Kion for help in improving the engineer experience to accelerate cloud adoption.

KION’S OFFERING

Kion calls its approach to cloud governance and management “cloud enablement.” This term is intended to describe a combination of automation and orchestration, financial management, and ongoing compliance checks to gain visibility into and control over multiple clouds. 

Kion installs in the customer’s cloud account rather than as a software-as-a-service solution. Kion supports management across cloud providers and lets users integrate with identity access management tools including Okta, native Active Directory, and OneLogin; with IT service management platforms including ServiceNow, Jira, and Splunk; and with host-level vulnerability management technologies including Tenable.

Kion’s platform provides capabilities for automation and orchestration, financial management (FinOps), and continuous compliance, including self-service provisioning for use governance. For financial management, Kion users can allocate funds, receive alerts on potential budget overruns, and proactively remediate cost issues. Kion’s compliance measures contain auto-remediation for governance policy issues, as well. Kion assesses factors such as budget and funding sources to show what remains in a budget, and where that money came from to align cost management, budgeting, and forecasting. Kion’s compliance capabilities enforce policies across clouds at project and resource levels. Kion supports more than 4,500 compliance checks and provides a security control matrix that displays how cloud layers are meeting requirements.

Admins can enforce budget actions that prevent overspending in DevOps and sandbox environments. Kion pulls in data from multiple sources to auto-populate fields.

Standard support for Kion includes email with a two-business-day response time, and access to the Kion Support Center. Customers may procure annual premium support to have a dedicated technical account manager.

Kion’s pricing depends on cloud spend under management. The company sells directly through its in-house sales teams, third-party partners, and on cloud marketplaces. Kion also provides a back-end platform which can be white-labeled to support managed service providers, resellers, and system integrators.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Kion wins customers based on several operational challenges. First, it attracts users who struggle to move into the cloud quickly. Second, Kion appeals to organizations struggling with cloud spend excesses, wasted resources, and security concerns. Third, Kion lands users lacking preventive controls. Finally, the company gets new business from companies seeking to remove complexity as they provision new cloud accounts and projects.

Kion competes most often against internal processes or homegrown tools. It also competes against Spot by NetApp and CloudHealth by VMware in the financial reporting realm. On the security end, Kion faces Fugue and Turbot in competitive deals. Some organizations view Kion as a platform that integrates those products (and others), or as a tool that will eventually replace those other brands. Rather than bifurcate personas into specific operational responsibilities — say, by FinOps, SecOps, and DevOps — Kion aligns with business personas and role-based governance across the platform based on functional need and to control spend.

Kion states that customers see savings of at least 30 percent through savings opportunities and cost optimizations. With automation, Kion claims soft-dollar savings can exceed 60 percent if organizations are willing to also review staffing, process, and policy decisions. Kion’s reference customers include NASA, Indeed, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Encamp.

KION’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Kion plans to build more contextual insight to display cloud environment behaviors that are interrelated so users can make more informed decisions. Kion also intends to add more compliance policies as well as cloud platforms beyond the Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that organizations — particularly in government, higher education, and commercial enterprise — trying to manage one or more of the top three public cloud providers consider Kion. Kion focuses on ease-of-use and cross-departmental visibility to avoid overspending and ensure security and compliance. That streamlined approach provides a single view for cloud cost and optimization management, budgeting, and technology implementation. Amalgam Insights recommends Kion for companies that seek to cut cloud costs and consider financial management to be part of a greater effort of improving operational performance associated with cloud services.

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 Vendor Profile: Yotascale

As Amalgam Insights continues to present independent profiles of vendors in the cloud cost management and optimization space, we next highlight a company that takes an engineer-specific approach. This differentiator takes aim at organizations with a certain level of maturity within their cloud environments, as well as a particular spend threshold. Read on to learn more about Yotascale and to glean Amalgam Insights’ recommendations.

WHY YOTASCALE FOR CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION

  • Engineer-specific design for cloud cost ownership
  • Consistent view of cloud costs for all users
  • Normalized and automated tagging for cloud resource tracking

ABOUT YOTASCALE

Yotascale is noted as an Amalgam Insights Distinguished Vendor for Cloud Cost and Optimization Management. A relative newcomer in the cloud cost and optimization management space, Yotascale, founded in 2015, states that it manages more than $1 billion in cloud computing spend across infrastructure, platforms, and software. The Palo Alto-based company targets enterprises and mid-market organizations across verticals including media and entertainment, financial services, healthcare, transportation, and real estate.

These users typically spend at least $3 million per year on cloud computing, as spend below that level is often handled through cloud service providers’ native tools. Yotascale has raised $24 million; its most recent round in October 2020 raised $13 million in B series funding. The company currently employs fewer than 50 people and does not disclose its revenue or client retention rate.

YOTASCALE’S OFFERING

Yotascale started to design its cloud cost management and optimization platform with engineers in mind, followed by cloud operations experts and finance professionals. The company did this to help organizations empower engineers to own responsibility for cloud costs. Yotascale’s perspective states that engineers understand the impact of performance

changes on expenses, so they are ideally positioned to oversee those adjustments. As such, Yotascale built an interface that relies on fewer modules than some other software vendors in the cloud cost management space. In Yotascale, all users have the same view of cost data presented in their organization’s business context (although depending on their role, individuals can view the data through a customizable lens) to prevent confusion among departments. However, role-based access is supported to ensure users only have access to data according to their role, as well as alerts and recommendations that apply to their jobs.

Once configured, the Yotascale software helps normalize tag names across cloud providers and services, and provides automated tagging policies for cloud resources in the organization’s preferred nomenclature. That way, users can see an all-in-one view of their multi-cloud resources as well as containerized workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, as of May 2022. Yotascale has plans to add Google Cloud to its roster, rounding out its coverage of the current market-leading hyperscalers.

Yotascale bases its pricing on a percent of monthly resource hours of services (such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service), rather than by percent of the total bill. Yotascale offers tiered pricing, typically starting at a cloud usage level of 200,000 hours per month. Standard features and services provided by Yotascale include:

  • AWS/Azure spend under management
  • Inventory of AWS accounts or Azure subscriptions
  • User accounts
  • Billing data processing
  • Cost reduction recommendations
  • Billing data anomaly detection

The base pricing package includes all Yotascale features as well as capabilities to provide insight into cloud carbon footprints so organizations can reduce compute power and support sustainability initiatives.

Prior to launching its application in production, Yotascale works with each customer to create the business context for automated tagging. The process can take as little as two weeks, depending on the end user’s readiness and existing documentation. Installing and onboarding the Yotascale software itself takes less than an hour. Yotascale’s reference customers include Zoom, Hulu, Compass, Lime, Okta, and Klarna. Yotascale sells through its direct sales teams as well as a third-party channel that includes consultants and managed service providers.

COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Yotascale finds that it competes most often against organizations’ internal spreadsheets, as well as first-generation deployments of VMware’s CloudHealth and Apptio Cloudability. Yotascale states that it can reduce cloud computing costs by up to 50% compared to existing cloud cost management efforts. Yotascale states that its customer wins are based on the following: an engineer-specific focus and the ability to assign assets to engineers; its emphasis on tag normalization; its all-in-one views; and data that show how changes will impact performance and cost.

YOTASCALE’S PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Yotascale next plans to build support for Google Cloud Platform cost management and provide self-service onboarding automation. It also intends to add more integrations as users seek to access existing cost management, billing, and sourcing tools as they consolidate data.

AMALGAM INSIGHTS RECOMMENDATIONS

Amalgam Insights recommends that enterprise and mid-market organizations seeking to empower engineers with cloud cost responsibility and spending a minimum of $3 million per year on cloud computing consider Yotascale. Yotascale is built to support engineers seeking to support accounting requests, tagging automation, and service usage requests for cloud cost management demands that exceed in-house capabilities.

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 Vendor Profile: Apptio Cloudability

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

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.

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Cloud Cost Management Vendor Profile: Spot by NetApp

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.