Video: How CloudForecast Helps Mid-Market Companies Control AWS Costs

hey Channel insiders I'm your host Katie boso and welcome to partner POV where today we'll explore the convenience and value of the AWS cost management tool cloud forecast if you're scaling on AWS without a full-time finops resource you know how quickly you can get stuff between out-of control costs and unexpected end of Monon invoices engineering and devop teams can get out of this conundrum and get the visibility and practicality they're looking for with cloud forecast to learn more about this startup I now welcome the CEO of cloud forecast Tony Chan welcome Tony thank you for having me on Katie thank you so much for being here Tony I have to point out not only are you the CEO of cloud forecast but you also co-founded the company six years ago which is quite a while in startup years I believe that makes you an elder in startup years so very experience yeah yeah quite quite long in startup years for sure so when would you say this was a moment of inspiration in which cloud forecast was born I always like to think that you kind of had this uh lightning rod moment but for you when would you say cloud forecast was born and what greater purpose has it grown into yeah absolutely so this um moment of inspiration was born actually had a first startup that we worked on early 2010s and at that time my co-founder fris as a scaling startup growing in many ways possible our ads bill was ballooning as well so at the time he had the idea of like hey I wish I had a really easy and simple tool to help me manage costs while all the technical things I have to deal with and at that time um a lot of our current competitors actually had a free tool at that time that was just a simple email that let them know how much you're spending and in less than 30 seconds he knew exactly what was going on but the problem was uh eventually as those companies rais VC money and raised a bunch of funds they started really upcharging that tool and starting to expand their offering a subscription and starting to expand towards Fortune 500 Fortune 1000 companies and started making the tool very costly and he he pretty much canceled the subscription it's like hey I want to table this and come back to it our company eventually got Acquired and then uh for us we had a turning point of our careers were like hey think we want to do the startup thing again let's come back to this idea so that's kind of like how we pretty much got started and we came back to the idea at first it was a very simple tool and iterated to what it is now today and being able to help midmarket high growth startups scaling on ads get better visibility on their ads costs so I definitely want to talk more about how you're helping those those midmarket companies scale in just a moment but I I want to consider those who are watching are anywhere on their AWS Journey potentially just starting out so I want to know what often makes monitoring AWS costs a struggle for your customers and how does this become increasingly more difficult as they do scale I think time is a big factor right um within your organization we find that more often than not as you scale and as you grow your company the first person in line to manage ads cost and get better visibility into it and answer questions that's CFO or CTO or C my have might come down towards a director of engineering AI or devops however they are tasked to also move the company forward on a technical point of view as well so it's like well where do they spend their time do they spend their time on trying to innovate and move the company forward or do they take a pause on kind of like hey do I take a step back design report extract what I can extract information needed to kind of give back the information back to the CEOs and the stakeholders and such so I think that's where the struggle is it's the time I think we also find that a lot of tools that are in the market are just overly complex for that set of customers unless you have somebody spending full time digging into those financial costs and what's going on within cost explor and such can take up a lot of time so you know once again and go back to time complexity and what we focused on is how do we summarize information so it's very easy to understand for those users Tony I think some people might be listening to us and wondering well doesn't AWS help businesses monitor the cost of the tools they leverage from it like AWS cost Explorer how do you respond to them yeah so we think AWS cost Explorer is actually great and they provide a lot of great tools and uh information back to the end user however I think there's a few gaps one is as you're scaling your business and you have multiple engineering teams and multiple engineering managers trying to keep track and Pulsa cost it can get pretty complex and difficult and challenging for one person to try to extract the information data needed to make a decision on whatever that may be maybe a cost overrun or perhaps something got turned off so I think that's one I think number two with cost Explorer can be kind of complex to use and timec consuming right so I think for us once again we go back to summarizing the data so in less than 30 seconds you understand what's going on with your ads cost so I think there's use cases for cost Explorer but what we do supplements a lot with what cost Explorer does and doesn't actually compete against it directly I'd like to get to know the customers that you often see coming in and utilizing cloud forecast what kinds of businesses and roles are cloud forecast customers in yeah so a lot of the roles that cloud forecast addresses are folks that are in engineering leadership position or technical positions within their organization the reason being is they have the full access to their whole ads environment so naturally we like to joke that that they've been volun toed that they're now monitoring managing and Reporting back on ads costs along with their technical responsibilities in terms of types of companies uh the ones that we found very good success in are companies that are just scaling generally more than 200 employees multiple engineering teams multiple stakeholders C Level Executives that are just wondering about AWS cost so to kind of summarize that we find that it's a lot of complex organizations with many stakeholders within the organization now when we first started you did mention how cloud forecast differentiates itself from some competitors in this space by catering to those mid-market companies instead of the ones that really go Enterprise and Beyond from there can you talk more about the differentiators of cloud forecast from those competitors yeah there's a few differentiators that we found and that's kind of like gaps in the market one we find a lot of those tools are overly complex with tons of features and don't get me wrong those are great features if you have a full-time person monitoring managing and extracting the value and data out of it however if you don't have a full-time person all that's going to be going to waste right so for us we focus on simple easy to understand reports getting to the root analysis and cause of whatever that might be going with on your adus cost so might be overrun so for us we summarize a lot of data I think secondly um the other gap that we see in the market is a price pricing standpoint a lot of the tools out there charge a percentage of ads Bend which can be kind of costly for the end user in itself right uh one to anywhere to 8% from what we've seen last so I think that you know asking a company to take that out of their margins with their ads costs it's very very expensive in addition to as well it doesn't act in the best interest so for us we focused on Flat Rate subscription pricing that can be predictable for the procurement team as well and then kind of going back to the first one due to their complex feature a lot of things that they do is cater towards Fortune 500 Fortune 1,000 companies right big companies on that side whereas we build features um that we think that caters back to the end user if you're a mid-market size company high growth startup don't have a full-time finops resource and you just need something to kind of help supplement what you're doing and to save you time as well so Tony how do cloud forecast tools prioritize the needs of vars and resellers in the it Channel who specifically serve the mid-market and high growth startups scaling on AWS yeah I think there's a few things one is kind of going back to what I mentioned Gap in the market right a lot of the tools out there right now are just overly expensive and it might be a non-starter for a lot of your end users and clients at the end of the day so I think with cloud forecast our price point Simplicity be able to build features that addresses that market I think it's just another option that you can have at your disposal to serve your end user and client I think two also it's just the another set of features that you can have as a VAR and reseller to just have really good educated conversation about adus cost back to your user like you might be managing many many clients on your side and you just want a simple way to track and just have good conversations you know we can build features and we also have features internally that can serve you so you can focus and kind of serve your end user better I think third twoo one thing that we've seen too it's like with visibility of AWS cost and Trust in it it ends up adopting more ads Services the end user in itself right because they have trust in how much they're spending and where they're spending so one thing that we've seen is end users end up spending more in ads on the long term because they feel confident on where they're spending and how they're spending internally as they adopt more ads services on their side so you can also count on that with cloud forecast how well does cloud forecast integrate into a customer's environment and how quickly can they anticipate results once implementing it it could be really fast uh so the initial signup process we've kind of calculated it takes less than four minutes to S sign up yeah so it's it's pretty simple uh we have a cloud formation template where user can leverage and it just creates a IMR that gives us read only access to an S3 bucket and it's also creating what it's called a curve file which is the adus billing file and that's really it um and is a few clicks and few steps we try to grab as little permissions possible to be secure as possible and also to just follow ads best practices when it comes to things like this so it's pretty fast and pretty quick in terms of getting set up with a free trial with cloud forecast I love that you mentioned the the security in mind of that too which is obviously something that's huge nowadays and and always a part of a conversation when talking about new tools but I want to hear this put into practice in the real world so Tony can you tell me a success story in which cloud forecast helped a company grow or innovate Beyond the Wall it may have been hitting yeah absolutely so a lot of our users come to us saying hey we would love to give better visibility to our Engineers so they can own their costs keep tracking their costs and see and catch potential overruns so we have this one user um out in India and their e-commerce company and it's a pretty big company very complex about 30 different engineering teams and they came to us with that exact use case and problem that they want us to solve within two weeks we started getting responses from those engineering teams asking questions about ads costs and seeing engagement internally about ads costs which I thought was really cool because before they used cloud forecast no one was really watching the bill as closely as they should have and then after CL forecast our champion at this company mentioned hey we're starting to have really great conversations about idus cost uh people in Slack are starting threads about adus cost and the visibility they have before so for us you know that's a successful use case is we are seeing us and what we provide Drive engagement and discussions and socialization of our cost or ads cost back to the end user which I think is really neat to see that is really wild to hear about you always know that something is sucessful when the slack channels start going off about it so hats off to you on that Tony as the CEO and co-founder what's one of your favorite features of cloud forecast or maybe one your customers often get excited about that they didn't expect to one of my favorite features is called the monthly financial report so one problems we see with especially complex organization with multiple stakeholders is like how do you align SE level executiv VP SVP Finance team engineering team to have a single source of Truth to start having discussions around their ads Bill and invoice right without cloud forecast it might be the engineering trying to figure out okay how do I design this you know what do you care about you know what are the numbers what are the questions you're looking to answer so we have this feature called the monthly financial report which we essentially dump everything into a big Excel file and design in a way where users can get everything they need to know about their Adis costs on a monthly aggregate basis and it's really easy easy to understand for sea Lev Executives VPS that just want a monthly overview of what's going on with ads costs I think it's neat because we see users bring this into board member meetings bring into you know planning meetings so they can just throw it up on a big screen and just kind of run through hey ads cost is going up and down here and there reasons why and just can be able to just extract information from it right and it's automatic and it comes every month in the beginning month when the ads invoice arrives and CFOs love it CTO love it cosos love it because it's just a really great way to align the whole organization to start talking about ad best costs so Tony for those who are listening and going this is absolutely something I need to explore where can they go to learn more about cloud forecast and get in touch with you yeah there's two ways one you can go to our marketing website which is www. cloud forecast.io there's a lot of information in there kind of give you guys use case and also case studies of where we've been successful or two um you can reach out to franois my co-founder and I have Founders atcloud forecast.io so what we like to do especially on the first call is just to understand and learn more about your business and see if we can actually be a use case and provide you value and that's kind of like our model we want to be fair and honest uh business owners on our side so for us if we don't think it's a good fit we'll let you know and we would recommend you know XYZ or something else but for us we want to ensure that we have happy customers Ure it's a good fit and we can actually bring you value oh I love that Tony thank you so much for joining me today to tell me about cloud forecast and share your thoughts and your expertise with our audience I appreciate it thank you and thanks to our audience for joining us for more episodes of partner POV check out channel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time I

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