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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.

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Cloud Cost Management Part 5: Understanding Vendors’ Key Differentiators

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

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

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

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

1. Automated Orchestration for Cloud Workloads

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

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

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

2. Budgeting Sources and Forecasting

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

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

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

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

3. Continuous Kubernetes Container Optimization

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

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

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

4. Depth of Data to Support Machine Learning

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

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

5. Proprietary Intellectual Property

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

Next Steps

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

Need More Guidance Now?

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

Market Milestone – VMware Aria Transforms the Technology Lifecycle Management Market with Holistic Cloud Management Capabilities

Title: VMware Aria Transforms the Technology Lifecycle Management Market with Holistic Cloud Management Capabilities

Author: Hyoun Park

Key Stakeholders: CIO, CTO, FinOps Directors and Managers, Cloud Cost Directors and Managers, Platform Engineers, Release Managers, Software Engineering Directors and Managers, IT Architects, VP of IT, IT directors, IT Procurement, IT Sourcing, Technology Expense Managers and Directors

Why It Matters: As cloud platform and infrastructure costs continue to grow over 40% per year and become increasingly complicated with private cloud, containerization, and cloud data growth trends, VMware Aria has created the first holistic hybrid cloud platform designed to manage the cost, operations, and ongoing management of complex enterprise cloud environments.

Top Takeaway: VMware Aria is a transformational management platform allowing cloud managers to bring together asset management, service management, cost management, integration visibility, and workflow automation visibility. VMware Aria’s capability to conduct unit-based economics across the entire umbrella of cloud services along with the relationship analysis and API access that VMware Aria Graph provides is a novel IT management capability that should be immediately considered by any cloud-using enterprise with over $5 million in annual cloud spend, as they will be able to both gain operational productivity advantages and strategic analytic capabilities through this holistic approach to cloud management.

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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 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 organization’s information within the various cloud resources stays in line with privacy laws such as Europe’s 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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April 22: From BI to AI (Amazon, Arcion, Azure, Dassana, Databricks, Denodo, Grafana, IBM, Oracle, Privitar, SAS, StreamNative, TIBCO, Vianai)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding

Dassana Surfaces From Stealth, Secures $5M in Seed Round

Cloud log lake company Dassana secured $5M in seed funding this week. Dell Technologies Capital led the round, with participation from additional angel investors. Dassana also announced that the Dassana Cloud Log Lake was now in public beta, distinguished by separating storage and compute to promote cost savings, and an optimized storage data structure to make queries to its cloud log lake highly performative.

Partnerships

Arcion Partners With Databricks

Last week, Arcion launched Arcion Cloud, its data replication platform; this week, Arcion announced that Arcion Cloud was now available via Databricks Partner Connect, enabling Databricks users to begin using Arcion to copy and move data from high-volume transactional databases without requiring coding skills.

Privitar Partners with Denodo

Data provisioning software provider Privitar announced a strategic partnership with Denodo, a data integration and management software provider. Combining Denodo’s data virtualization capabilities with Privitar’s focus on data provisioning and privacy will allow customers to provision their data in more easily reusable ways, while enforcing proper access and governance, and remaining compliant with applicable regulations.

Launches and Updates

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now Generally Available

At AWS Summit yesterday, Amazon announced the release of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2. Aurora Serverless is a database option for applications with unpredictable traffic that automatically scales capacity up and down as needed. Improvements to v2 include significantly quicker scaling speeds (fractions of a second as opposed to taking several seconds and up to nearly a minute in some cases with v1), and more granular scaling capabilities (v1 could only increase capacity by doubling).

Azure Managed Grafana Now In Preview

On April 18, Microsoft announced that Azure Managed Grafana was now available in preview, allowing Azure customers to integrate Grafana dashboards into their Azure environment, facilitating access to Azure services and data sources from within said dashboards. This includes the ability to securely share Grafana dashboards with Azure Active Directory.

Databricks Announces Media and Entertainment Lakehouse Offering

In the continuing rollout of vertical-specific lakehouse offerings, this week, Databricks debuted its Media and Entertainment Lakehouse. Notable features include accelerators for core industry use cases such as AI-driven recommendation engines, advertising optimization, and customer lifetime value and churn, among others.

StreamNative Launches StreamNative Cloud for Kafka

On April 21, StreamNative, a messaging and event streaming platform, announced StreamNative Cloud for Kafka. The new product addresses a couple of common issues Kafka users encounter with particularly high volumes of streaming data, while allowing users to continue ingesting streaming data formatted in the Kafka protocol but processing it under the hood using Apache Pulsar. StreamNative, founded in 2019, raised a $23M A round last fall.

TIBCO WebFOCUS 9.0.0 Makes its Debut

On April 19, TIBCO announced the release of TIBCO WebFOCUS 9.0.0. Key additions include a Container Edition of WebFOCUS, which permits Kubernetes deployments from within WebFOCUS; the Hub, a directory that makes it easier for users to access content and data from any device within WebFOCUS; and Designer updates that streamline the ability to create, manage, and stage datasets when creating content.

VIANAI Systems Introduces Vian H+AI

On April 19, Vianai Systems, an AI platform company headed by former SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, launched the Vian H+AI platform. The initial rollout includes Vian MLOps, to manage, optimize, deploy, and govern machine learning models. Key capabilities include model risk monitoring, software-based performance optimization, and quick model operationalization.

Appointments

SAS Data Ethics Director Reggie Townsend Named to National AI Advisory Committee

Reggie Townsend, director of the Data Ethics Practice for SAS, has been named to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC). The NAIAC advises the President on AI-related issues; members of the committee serve three-year terms. Townsend is also on the board of EqualAI, a nonprofit that works to reduce unconscious bias in AI development and usage.

Events

IBM’s Annual Think Conference to Expand Globally

IBM Think 2022 will kick off its flagship event in person in Boston on May 10, to be followed by a global “Think on Tour” series of invite-only gatherings. IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna will provide the opening keynote in Boston. Key conference themes will include how AI and automation provide opportunities to rethink business operations, among other topics. IBM will also present Think Broadcast on May 10 and 11, a live anchored program for those who cannot attend Think 2022 in person.

One Last Note

61% of People Believe Bots Will Succeed Where Humans Have Failed with Corporate Sustainability

According to a new Oracle-Harvard study. Whether this speaks to the survey respondents’ faith in AI or doubt in humanity …

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March 25: From BI to AI (Astronomer, C3 AI, Datagen, Dataiku, Datakin, Domino, HEAVY.AI, Hex, Informatica, NVIDIA, Snorkel AI, Talend)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding (and an Acquisition)

Astronomer Raises $213 Million Series C and Acquires Datakin; Scales Operations Amid Booming Growth and Global Demand
On March 23, data orchestration platform Astronomer announced that it had raised a $213M Series C round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from JP Morgan, K5 Global, Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Venrock. The funding will be used for hiring in engineering and Customer Success, scaling up go-to-market operations, and R+D. Astronomer also revealed in the same announcement that it had acquired Datakin, a data lineage solution, and will be integrating it into Astronomer.

Datagen Obtains $50 Million in Series B Funding

Datagen, a synthetic data generator for computer vision systems, announced March 23 that it had closed $50M in Series B funds. Scale Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Spider Capital, TLV Partners, and Viola Ventures. As part of the transaction, Scale Venture Partners’ Andy Vitus joins Datagen’s board of directors.

Hex Raises $52M Series B

On March 22, Hex, a collaborative data science and analytics platform, announced that it had raised a $52M Series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Additional participants included new investors Snowflake and Databricks, as well as existing investors Amplify Partners and Redpoint. Funding will go towards hiring and research and development.

Product Launches and Updates

C3 AI Version 8 to Accelerate the Development of Enterprise AI Applications – C3 AI

On March 23, C3 AI announced that C3 AI Application Platform Version 8 was now generally available. Key features of the newest release include additional pre-built and extensible AI apps for supply chain planning and execution within C3 AI Applications; C3 AI Virtual Data Lake, a way to aggregate an organization’s data into one image to mitigate the need to replicate said data for analytics and AI processing; C3 AI Data Vision, which enables AI-driven knowledge graphs to facilitate more advanced data visualization and AI discovery; C3 AI Studio, a low-code AI app development environment; and C3 AI Ex Machina, a no-code machine learning canvas.

Domino Data Lab Announces NVIDIA Fleet Command Support
Domino Data Lab announced new integrations with NVIDIA in the wake of GTC 2022. Domino now supports NVIDIA Fleet Command, permitting model deployment on edge devices. In addition, Domino’s Enterprise MLOps platform is now available through NVIDIA LaunchPad, a way to run pilot projects to assess appropriate purchase decisions for data projects.

HEAVY.AI Introduces Version 6.0

On March 22, HEAVY.AI announced a limited release of HEAVY.AI 6.0. Key new capabilities include HeavyConnect, a way to analyze and visualize an organization’s data wherever it is without moving or copying it; performance improvements for HeavyDB and HEAVY.AI overall; an admin panel for Heavy Immerse providing thorough oversight of existing deployments; and in beta, the ability to integrate machine learning models into the analytics workflow, both in Heavy Immerse and by SQL queries. HEAVY AI 6.0 will be generally available in April.

Informatica Launches Vertical-Specific IDMC for Retail
On March 24, Informatica announced the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail, focusing on retail-specific challenges in data fragmentation and the complexity of a multi-cloud hybrid environment. Spotlighted issues addressed include upgrades to data governance and privacy capabilities, improving inventory visibility and demand forecasting capabilities, and enabling customers to provide more personalized shopping experiences.

NVIDIA AI Improves on Speech, Recommender System and Hyperscale Inference Capabilities
At GTC 2022, NVIDIA announced updates to its NVIDIA AI Platform. These updates include improvements to NVIDIA Triton, a model inference solution; NVIDIA Riva, a speech AI SDK; NVIDIA NeMo Megatron, a training framework for large language models; NVIDIA Merlin, a recommendation AI; and NVIDIA Maxine, an audio and video enhancement SDK. In addition, NVIDIA released AI Enterprise 2.0, with certification for Red Hat Open Shift, allowing customers to use containerized machine learning tools across a variety of data centers and cloud platforms.

Snorkel AI Announces Snorkel Flow
Snorkel AI announced that Snorkel Flow, its AI platform with automated labeling, was now generally available. Snorkel Flow key features include programmatic data labeling; a no-code machine learning modeling suite; workflows to improve training data quality, and for domain experts to provide input on data labeling; and templates for document classification and extraction.

Talend Data Catalog 8 Updates Focus on Data Compliance
On March 24, Talend announced the availability of Talend Data Catalog 8, part of its Talend Data Fabric platform. New capabilities in this release include automated data classification to classify data around things like compliance violations; the ability to export data lineage and transformation logic via APIs to meet compliance requests; and tailored business modeling to define domain meta models that most accurately match business priorities.

Hiring

Dataiku Brings Aboard Adam Towns as CFO

On March 23, Dataiku announced that they had hired Adam Towns as their Chief Financial Officer. Towns, well-experienced in tech finance, joins Dataiku from Sisense, where he was the CFO, leading their global finance and business operations team. Prior to that, Towns was the Senior VP of Strategic Finance and FP&A at Mimecast, where he brought the company through its IPO, increasing revenue by 15x and headcount by 20x during his tenure there.

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Managing Inventory for Kubernetes Cost Management

Last week, we mentioned why Kubernetes is an important management concern for cloud-based cost management. To manage Kubernetes from a financial perspective, Amalgam Insights believes that the foundational starting point needs to be in discovering and documenting the relevant technical, financial, and operational aspects of container inventory.

Kubernetes Cost Management requires a complete inventory of containers that includes the documentation of namespaces, clusters, and pods associated with each node. This accounting allows companies to see how their Kubernetes environment is currently structured and provides the starting point for building a taxonomy for Kubernetes.

In addition, a container-based inventory also needs to include the technical context associated with each container. Containers must be tracked along with the cloud-based storage and compute services and resources associated with the container across the lifespan of the container. Since the portability of containers is a key value proposition, companies must focus on the time-series tracking of assets, services, and resource allocation with each container.

Containers must also track these changes on an ongoing basis as they are not simply static assets like a physical server. Although IT organizations are used to looking at usage, itself, on a time-series basis, IT assets and services are typically tracked simply based on when they are moved, added, changed, or deleted. Now, assets and services must also be tracked based on when they are reassigned and reallocated across containers and workloads. These time-based assignments for container-based reassignment can be difficult to track without a strategy to track these changes over time.

Inventories must also be tagged from an operational perspective, where containers and clusters are associated with relevant applications, functions, resources, and technical issues. This is an opportunity to tag containers, namespaces, and clusters with relevant monitoring tools, technical dependencies, cloud providers, applications, and other requirements for supporting containers.

From a practical perspective, this combination of operational, financial, and technical tagging ensures that a container can be managed, duplicated, altered, migrated, or terminated without any effects to relevant working environments. There is no point in saving a few dollars, Euro, or yuan only to impair an important test or production environment.

Kubernetes inventory management requires a combination of operational, financial, and technical information tracked over time to fully understand both the business dependencies and cost efficiencies associated with containerizing applications.

To learn more about Kubernetes Cost Management and key vendors to consider, read our groundbreaking report on the top Kubernetes Cost Management vendors.