In the realm of enterprise technology, the Cloud has long been touted for its ability to deliver on three key promises: affordability, simplicity, and scalability. The extent to which Cloud services have fulfilled these promises remains very much in the eye of the beholder. One indisputable fact – a significant percentage of cloud spend today is sub-optimized – waste estimates vary from 30% (McKinsey) to 33% (Accenture). Customers therefore cannot afford to ignore active management of their Cloud infrastructure. Especially in light of budgets that are expected to continue growing 25%+ year-over-year!
Interestingly, we at DigitalEx have noticed a recent strong push by our customers to channel their Cloud Cost Management work to and through partners – Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Global Systems Integrators (GSIs) in particular. We see this trend validated by third parties such as MSP Today (“FinOps-as-a-Service will be a Massive Threat or Opportunity for MSPs”).
These customers seek turnkey solutions, relinquishing the need to maintain an in-house FinOps department and preferring to entrust cloud infrastructure management to organizations with the requisite expertise.
This trend presents both challenges and opportunities for companies like DigitalEx. No longer can assumptions be made that buyers and users solely consist of enterprise FinOps or IT personas. Now, companies must cater to *both* partners and end customers, recognizing and addressing their unique needs and requirements.
DigitalEx has directed focused research and development efforts toward supporting this partner-centric model through its innovative “multi-tier” architecture. The concept revolves around enabling a single partner to serve multiple customers from a single “tier.” Partners can onboard, offboard, report across, and manage pricing visibility for each customer directly.
Concurrently, each customer can manage multiple clouds for cost visibility and optimization, all while maintaining strict data isolation from one another. A study by Forrester Research underscores the importance of data isolation and security in multi-tenant environments (“The Total Economic Impact™ of Google Cloud Anthos“).
DigitalEx believes that this architecture is pivotal in supporting the evolving four-way relationship within the FinOps landscape: hyperscalers (AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI), partners (MSPs/GSIs), customers, and FinOps platforms (like DigitalEx).
With numerous successful implementations of this architecture already in production, DigitalEx invites interested partners to reach out and learn more about how we can assist them in navigating this transformative landscape.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sundeep is currently the CEO of DigitalEx – a leader in the Cloud FinOps space with a particular focus on LLM workload optimization. He is an enterprise software veteran across several quality VC-backed technology companies and has held leadership roles at Netsuite, Adthena, and Procore. He has significant experience helping to scale up B2B software organizations commercially and has held CRO, COO, and VP Sales titles across his career.
Sundeep has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, 2 boys, and puppy.