Cloud Cost Management – Amalgam Insights

Posted on October 14, 2024October 11, 2024 by Hyoun Park — Leave a comment

The Evolution and Expansion of IT FinOps

At Amalgam Insights, we’ve long championed the Technology Lifecycle Management approach to describe the many areas existing across IT FinOps to reduce costs across hyperscalers, data clouds, Software-as-a-Service, networking, enterprise mobility, and telecom costs. Usage optimization is not enough. Product rationalization is not enough. Contract negotiations are not enough. And when these opportunities are not bridged, additional opportunities fall by the wayside across the IT environment.

One of the most interesting trends of 2024 has been the FinOps Foundation’s initial steps into software management. As cloud FinOps starts entering the already-established worlds of SaaS management and network management, it will be interesting to see both where cloud FinOps’ comfort zone of massive usage and product tradeoffs help the more static worlds of software and telecom as well as where FinOps’ traditional struggles with business taxonomy, detailed sub-user chargebacks, and lack of contract detail start to push against the issues that you, I, and the rest of the IT world have been dealing with for the past 15+ years. Unlike Cloud FinOps, Software FinOps and Telecom FinOps have a long history of multi-user monitoring, usage, and cost management and to avoid cooperating with end-user requests for any type of market-wide billing or usage standardization.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on my SmartList of IT FinOps vendors (thank you to all the vendors and customers for your participation!) with a eye towards looking at vendors focused on bridging gaps between cloud FinOps and the rest of the IT world. Out of the 300+ vendors I look at from an IT expense lifecycle perspective, I’ve narrowed the list down to 15 vendors that I think are really doing something different, which will be our Distinguished Vendors. But I am also starting to find some interesting trends that make these distinguished vendors different from the extremely crowded portfolio of options that IT departments face.

Before getting to those, let’s just define what is not considered differentiated in 2024. Simply ingesting bills is not good enough. Being customer-centric and having attention to detail are considered table stakes if you cannot provide customers that vouch for your approach being quantitatively better than other competitors. Everybody I cover can support tagging. Cross-charging is a standard enterprise ask in RfX activity. Basic dashboards and analytics are standard (and if you haven’t chosen a high-performance analytics solution like Sisense or Sigma or Qrvey, you’re probably behind for supporting real-time changes). And everyone is competing against 2020s-era design standards for SaaS as a standard, especially with the flood of money that has gone into the data and code-centric Third Wave of FinOps.

First, as expected, top vendors are often finding now that they are the second or third solution chosen at the enterprise level. IT buyers have often focused on the “up and to the right” vendor landscape too much in their purchase of FinOps and IT expense management solutions with the assumption that these are commoditized solutions rather than the financial window to the pulse of the digital business. Although every business today likes to talk about how they have “digitally transformed” and are “data-driven,” the truth is that companies have not fully embraced data and digital business until the actual cost of data infrastructure, delivery, and data-related customer activities can be finally categorized and calculated. And without FinOps and IT expense solutions, the comparative data simply isn’t there at the bill of material (BOM) or component level that we take for granted in manufacturing or service level. A digital business lacking formal IT FinOps is like managing a hospital without knowing how many procedures are being done or a discrete manufacturing company not knowing how many parts it uses.

Second, there is a massive effort to utilize and translate tagging efforts into standard business categories. The FinOps insistence on tagging service elements across infrastructure and platform without alignment to larger corporate or IT frameworks is starting to collapse into its own form of technical debt. The combination of poor data quality, inconsistent or idiosyncratic tagging, poor mapping to existing categories, and lack of integration with existing birthright and foundational enterprise applications has led to the need for better metadata definition and mapping. Of course, the goal here is not simply to create a pristine metadata environment (although I do love well defined taxonomies and ontologies!), but to deeply align IT to business so that product, service, and revenue managers know which technologies are vital to their work.

Third, data integrations and a unified data layer are increasingly important across vendors. One of the most salient and welcome aspects of the latest wave of FinOps solutions is the data layer that provides visibility across hyperscalers, data clouds such as Databricks, Snowflake, and Cloudera, as well as observability solutions such as Datadog. From a tactical perspective, this data ingestion helps cloud architects and digital business leaders to track costs. But it also helps set up the FinOps practitioner as a central player in managing the business aspects of digital behavior. The cost of accessing, processing, and utilizing data will only increase with the emergence of AI as a new massive spend area within IT. And although this cost is under the direct supervision of the CTO and CFO right now in many cases, it will all eventually filter down to some level of IT FinOps as the complexity of these ecosystems becomes too immense. Many of today’s top solutions are proactively setting themselves to be this data layer for supporting the future of IT activity.

Fourth, the tradeoffs between defined hyperscalers, defined on-premises services, virtualized services, and containerized services continue to be a challenge and the current answer is often to split each of these categories into a separate management solution. This is not a sustainable approach and Amalgam Insights both expects and encourages market consolidation so that FinOps professionals can see more of their infrastructure and platform investments under the same umbrella.

Fifth, everybody likes to talk about “cloud economics” while ignoring the “economics” part of the puzzle. There is a lot of focus on the mathematical aspects of large scale optimization of usage. And I get it. Techies love working with big problems and algorithmic fixes and finding clever ways to discover null values and aggregating pennies into dollars. This skill set is often what makes technology contributors invaluable both in developing architecture and in root-cause analysis for large enterprise challenges. But it is only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to aligning the financial health of the enterprise with digital and cloud activity. At some point, this optimization needs to be tied to the less exciting tasks of invoice processing, cross-checking billing rates with existing rates and discounts, direct product tradeoffs both within and across hyperscaler providers, comparing contract terms, enforcing contracted KPIs and timeframes, and aligning cloud activity to new accounting rules and tax credits. All of this is part of the microeconomics of cloud. Simply looking at usage optimization makes you a unit-specific beancounter. A true cloud economist needs to understand how the cost of cloud shapes the rest of the business and how it needs to be structured, reinforced, and defined based on all business forces.

Sixth, the cost of IT FinOps is changing rapidly. The first generation of cloud FinOps solutions charged similarly to software management and telecom management vendors where enterprise spend was based on a percentage of spend. But the problem is that these approaches started to outgrow their value for clients that grew their cloud spend to $50 million or $100 million and literally realized they could build their own solution and support it in perpetuity. We have seen solutions like Capital One Slingshot or Netflix’s development of NetflixOSS Ice, now supported by Teevity based on corporate efforts that became commercial products. So, there is a lot of pressure to drive down the cost of IT FinOps back to a flat license rate or user-based pricing once spend gets to an enterprise-tier. This pressure is exacerbated by the vendor sprawl across FinOps. For vendors that are product-based, this will continue to be a trend while companies shifting to a managed services approach will be able to maintain pricing based on the overall maintenance of the FinOps environment across billing, accounting, optimization, procurement, vendor relationships, governance, and IT-business alignment.

Those are some of the big trends I’ve been seeing so far over the last several months. There is a lot of nuance here, which I’m looking forward to digging into as I finalize the FinOps SmartList and get to highlight the Distinguished Vendors: the top 5% of companies that stand out both in their results and their differentiation. Is there anything you think I missed? Or do you want to talk more about either your FinOps product or your current FinOps RfP work? If so, get in touch with me at briefings@amalgaminsights.com.

Posted on June 30, 2023June 30, 2023 by Hyoun Park

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.

Posted on October 20, 2022October 18, 2022 by Kelly Teal — 1 Comment

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.

Posted on October 18, 2022October 18, 2022 by Kelly Teal

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.

Posted on September 29, 2022October 11, 2022 by Kelly Teal

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.

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Posted on September 8, 2022September 8, 2022 by Kelly Teal — 3 Comments

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.

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Posted on September 6, 2022October 31, 2022 by Kelly Teal — 1 Comment

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

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

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

Wait — Why Use a Vendor at All?

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

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

Figure 1: Technology Lifecycle Management

A Cautionary Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sifting Through the Benefits Statements

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

Similarity 1: Continuous Optimization

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

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

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

Similarity 2: Automation and Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted on September 1, 2022August 31, 2022 by Kelly Teal — 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Enterprise Challenges Addressed By Cloud Management and Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

Assessing Cloud Governance, Security, and Provisioning

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: Key Challenges for Managing Cloud Computing

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

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

Need More Guidance Now?

Check out Amalgam Insights’ new Vendor SmartList report, Control Your Cloud: Selecting Cloud Cost Management in the Face of Recession, available for instant download.

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