DigitalEx unveiled a new offering to optimize LLM-related expenses and is keeping an eye on the future of cloud spend.
Recently, leading FinOps platform known for multi-cloud and private cloud expertise, DigitalEx, announced a new solution to address the significant AI-related challenge of managing costs associated with Large Language Models (LLM).
The LLM Cost Management Solution unveiled by DigitalEx provides a comprehensive approach to understanding, controlling, and optimizing LLM-related expenses.
According to DigitalEx, this update offers significant benefits to users and partners alike. The benefits stretch beyond enhancing cost visibility with its centralized view of LLM costs from multiple vendors.
DigitalEx’s solution covers everything from allocation to forecasting and more
Founder and CEO of DigitalEx Sundeep Goel says that there are two key use cases for the solution. One being if you’re an organization running GPUs on-prem in a private cloud and need a way to do all the cost allocation, invoicing, budgeting, and forecasting around a private cloud GPU farm or cloud.
The second use case would be for an enterprise IT organization building applications on top of an AI platform and using multiple applications. Each application is using multiple models, but the LLM Cost Management Solution can help manage all the financials around those applications.
With this solution, managed service providers (MSPs) can help clients save on costs and not get hit with wasteful cloud and AI spend.
“From an MSP perspective, their customers have this double wave of cost hitting them and they need some way to help their customers not waste money knowing that anywhere from 30 to 35 percent of cloud spend today is literally waste,” Goel said during an interview with Channel Insider.
End customers will also be able to reap the benefits of this new solution, seeing savings on their AI and cloud bills, enjoying better forecasting, and ultimately seeing better cost allocation.
“There’s value for all parties, and it only works if there’s value for all parties, right?” Goel said. “What’s key to this is that it needs to be a win for the MSP and a win for the customer. The value is different, but there’s value for all parties.”
Additionally, the platform operates with cost data and usage data. It does not involve going into the data running on private clouds and only looks at the aggregated cost data and the aggregated usage data for private cloud usage. It then helps build budgets and allocation rules on a secure system that does not ingest any personally identifiable information.
AI & cloud innovations both on the horizon for DigitalEx
Goel believes that the industry is still at the beginning of the AI wave and that we haven’t fully seen what shape AI will ultimately take in the technology industry. This is emphasized by a recent webinar Goel spoke at two weeks ago that featured an audience of a couple hundred C-Suite and VP-level executives. Taking a poll that asked where they were in their AI journeys, roughly 87 percent responded that they were running pilots, but not yet in the production phase.
“There’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of piloting going on, but not that much is in production yet,” Goel said. “My expectation is that we’re a little bit early to market on the AI piece, but that’s okay because we want to be ready come Q1 and Q2 of next year when these applications flip to production and the costs are so much bigger than what CFOs are expecting and we can be there to help.”
Up next for DigitalEx is what they’re calling “cloud compare.” Goel says the idea with cloud compare is to match workloads to clouds so that MSPs and their clients can save on costs if they’re running on multiple clouds.
“You’re typically locked into an enterprise agreement with a cloud service provider and if you have no idea what it would cost to switch from one to another, you just don’t switch because you don’t know,” said Goel. “We want to help people match workloads to clouds.”
The halfway completed technology will save money for MSPs that are working with customers running on multiple clouds, Goel said, adding that it will provide even stronger financial insight into their budgets and forecasting.
As AI becomes more prevalent and cloud usage increases, costs will continue to climb for organizations. DigitalEx is positioning itself as a critical partner for tech vendors for strategic AI adoption and financial optimization.
FinOps continues to grow in prevalence as MSPs and their clients begin to optimize cloud spending that spiked during the height of the pandemic.