Video: How To Manage and Optimize FinOps With LucidPoint

hey Channel insiders welcome back to another episode of Channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it channel to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso I'm joined by two guests today and they are marabelle Mendoza head of product and Mike Fontaine CEO and Co co-founder of lucid point a VAR and hybrid Cloud consultant making finops easier for customers welcome and I have to start out first of all by saying Mike thank you for your service I read your bio and I've looked up some fun facts about you I know that you were a fighter pilot prior to this journey through the technology channel so thank you very much for your service I'm so impressed by your background and I just have to ask as far as becoming you know a fighter pilot and to becoming a leader of a business and having a background that spans between net app and hosting.com and these tech companies what's the biggest lesson that you've learned along in the journey that we can all find out you know right now and take into the rest of our careers it's just one common lesson learned is uh it's never too late so uh you know I did a lot of things that I always wanted to do and and one of the remaining things on my bucket list was to start my own company and uh despite having four kids with three in college it was you know probably the worst time to start a business but um so far so good so and that was that was back in 2017 so almost seven years ago wow that is incredible to know that that's when you started it too three kids in college I don't maybe don't don't do that part because they said yeah that's a great idea dad we we can still go on vacation right uh no you entered into my my next question which would be about lucid point I'd love to talk to you both about that as Mike said Lucid point was started in 2017 so Mike why don't you start us off with this question of what exactly is lucid point you know we found it Lucid Point uh as basically to be a great place to work um so that was kind of the Lucid point in our lives um so I've always loved being part of a high performing team and we have a fantastic group of people we saw this wave of Cloud coming um and you know we came out of the data center and and hardware and software Industries um and just saw this rapid move to the cloud and so really today what we are is a boutique Cloud consulting company um we help clients kind of on every stage of their Cloud Journey whether they're just starting to move applications into the public Cloud whether they've moved some and they just want to optimize or for some of our more mature clients um fops or helping them manage those Cloud environments cost effectively um is a huge passion of ours so anywhere where companies are on that cloud Journey we love to come in and help now I want to have a follow-up question there because you say a boutique shop and I think that there are many people who would call themselves that but for you specifically when you when you say Boutique how do you define that how how do your customers look at that so when I think about Boutique I think about kind of white glove High touch service so we always want to kind of be the the Nordstrom not the Walmart we're not the type of folks who you want to throw something over the fence and and we'll throw it back we want to be engaged and involved and that hi touch White Glove is to me what bontique represents I'm I'm obviously not a big shopper if you as you can tell by my clothes but um but that's what I think of when I think of Boutique marabel I'd love for you to give us your explanation of Boutique as well how do you view that and how does that help you with your mission in talking to your customers and approaching them well one I want to just come back and say that uh Mike you fulfilled on the uh making Lucid point a great place to work because it is a great place to work with a fantastic team on the boutique side I've been involved with fops and as we're talking about fobs what I've seen is you know there's a lot of tools out there and it's technology FOC focused and where our main differentiator is is that white glove service it's not just a tool that tells you go do this it's tooling and Ai and um really advanced technology plus humans humans who have gotten to know the business who understand the complexities of it can understand why something that a tool might spit out may not be the right choice or the right fit at that time for that business so that Boutique part for me really comes in in that contextualized recommendation marabel you had mentioned finops and the finops offering the first time I met you you had spoken about how that was born out of listening to your customers can you walk me through that specialty of lucid points and just discuss with me what exactly do you do to help your customers in that department well you're exactly right it was born out of listening to our customers and as Mike mentioned before you know we're there for our customers at various stages and as customers mature in their Cloud Journey you have the the wonderful you know dynamic model of the cloud um but with that come some new complexities for our customers and how do you manage that changing cost from month to month and for traditional you know business units you say okay here's how much we're we're expected to spend and here's how much we budget for and we build our forecast on these and that's very different in the cloud and so as our customers are now more mature in their Cloud we want to be able to provide them with new services that they need which is fops um so to help them manage uh their Cloud costs on an ongoing basis I like to think of it analogous to my own spending budget at home where I might have you know a set amount that I want to spend on on groceries or utilities or an emergency fund and if you're anything like me I have an Amazon Prime account where I buy lots of things and they're not necessarily categorized into whether it was a grocery expense or new shoes or you know some fun new technology toy that my kids wanted and so with finops if we come bring it back to businesses having a greater understanding of how that money is being spent so you don't have just one big bill that you really have not that much Clarity into where those resources are going and so bringing that back further you know you back to the how we normally budget and forecast we have to have a good idea of where that money is being spent how those resources are are being utilized and ensure that we don't have waste and so for our customers really listening to them and understanding where their goals are and how do we bring in our fops offering to help them better understand their Cloud cost get better visibility and really focus more on cost control and understanding so that they can then budget and forecast appropriately and Mike what would you like to add to that finops conversation one of the other things is you know coming from a traditional data center environment going into the cloud sometimes you're spending money on things that you don't know you're spending money on and doing it the old way as you would managing a data center with your own hardware and software uh is quite different in the cloud um a lot of people do what's called lift and shift and that means you just lift up an environment out of your data center shift it into AWS or Google Cloud um and continue it to run it the same way um but that's very cost inefficient and it's easy to spend a lot more money than you really think you're going to spend or really want to spend I love marelle's analogy I have another analogy KD it would be like if you said you know what I'm going to get rid of my car and I'm just going to use Uber from now on um and you said I've done the analysis I think it's you know it's about the same and then you asked Uber driver to sit in your driveway 24/7 to make sure that he or she was available in case you wanted to go somewhere you know in that case it's not going to be costeff effective right and so you have to make sure you're using these these modern tools the way they're designed to be used um as marel uh said you know on demand are you are you turning environments off when you're not using them nights weekends things like that so you just have to have to use them in a different way and the data center maybe that wasn't a big deal but AWS and Google and uh Microsoft are charging you for every moment you're using that whether you're really using it or not you spoke about some vendors right there so when it comes to Lucid point and what you offer I see that it's really tied with the Google Cloud platform uh can you talk about your relationship with Google Cloud sure we're a premier level partner which I guess puts us in the top 3% globally um which is really an awesome achievement for us um we do a lot of Google Cloud work we also do some AWS work we're starting to get asked to do more Azure work but we want to make sure we're really good at it before we uh jump into that poll as well Lucid point is a VAR but I know that you are building your managed Services practice can you talk to me about where that is right now and what's included in your portfolio yes we're very excited to have launched our manage services for Lucid point and right now we've kicked off with our uh fups for uh Google cloud and we have three tiers that we offer um we also offer premium support for Google Cloud customers and also have three tiers there um we will be very soon launching our AWS offerings so fups for AWS and support for AWS and Mike anything to add to that as far as your managed Service practice where did you see a need for those Services it's a good question you know initially we wanted to do just primarily Consulting but our clients keep asking us to come back and you know sometimes there's there's drift right you come in help someone fix something and then uh after a period of time it maybe drifts back uh out of alignment and so our clients have really asked hey can you give me um so much support on an ongoing basis on a monthly basis especially around f s and support and so it was really driven by customer demand and in some cases they already thought of us as a managed service provider and so all things pointed to rolling out these services and when it comes to what's impacting your customers's decisions AI is something that is so ubiquitous across the channel and Technology space right now and I wonder about if that's something that is on the top of your customers Minds along with some of the other trends that we're seeing in the space do they have questions that you're seeing patterns of or things that are impacting their buying decisions or their budgeting decisions right now marabel why don't you start us off with that question I think AI is is on everybody's mind right now on how will we use AI how will we use AI in a strategic way how do we ensure that we don't fall behind as others around us and other businesses are starting to use Ai and we're thinking about that too and so we're looking at you know how how do we answer that for ourselves how do we help our customers answer that and you know just bringing it back to our managed Services you know we're looking at how do we use AI Technologies to augment the things that we're already doing to help us scale faster to help us get to um responses for our customers but then very uh strategically discern what is real when is the right time to use it how do we make sure that we we use AI in a in a very intelligent way and so it's not just put something through a tool have ai spit on an answer then we turn around and give it to you because that's that's not going to be a great experience and so you know using AI for our uh recommendations and looking for ways to find cost optimizations yes but with that very important vetting from um our team that has the skills and experience to to find where it makes sense and where it may not everybody's talking about AI um I don't know how that's relating to buying decisions but I know it's top of mind for a lot of clients and and also you know Google and AWS have have both asked me like how are you uh how are you integrating AI into your strategy we always want to be a people first organization what we feel like is always having a human on top of AI so for example for a fups offering were you using um vertex Ai and some of the other Google AI tools um for those Cloud cost recommendations but then we have an analyst on top of that because we really think that a that a human who is leveraging those tools but but knows you knows your environment that that's the best marriage of of technology and and the human brain to help you you know save costs um so you know AI still has a long way to go um we always think that the having a human in front of it is is the way to go so we don't want to necessarily replace that with technology we want to augment technology with with that human back to that Boutique concept can you give me some examples of how you're building trusted relationships with your customers sure well I can think of one example recently where you know we're very excited about our finops offering but we also recognize that that may not be the where our customers are in their journey to say I need Bops managed services at this point and so one of the things that we offered is a a tags and labeling workshop and so this is a really great introduction into adding tags and labels to your data to really organize your data in in a efficient manner that helps you set up your your information for fops for cloud governance and you know kind of going back to my my shopping analogy at Amazon on if I could go and say this purchase was shoes this purchase was groceries this purchase was hand soap I can start to you know rein in my shoe shopping habit a little bit better when I realize that I'm buying new shoes every two weeks um and so that tags and labeling really helps to bring out some you know key things that you might see some Trends you might see now if I were to say okay now that I've tagged and labeled all my expenses I realize that I need a financial adviser to help me bring this more control to my spending and that's where you know we' I'd say okay for a company coming back to the analogy that's where okay I need manage services I need fitops to help me manage these costs more effectively so we can meet our customers where they're at and I should ask marabel when a customer is seeing those challenges when should they come to Lucid point for that help what are some key indicators that they can look for to go this is definitely something that I can't do on my own and I I certainly need professional help with this well one as we said before we meet customers where they're at at any stage of their Cloud Journey so I would say when they have a question come to Lucid point you know we we'll help you figure out if we're the right partners for you or if we're not we can recommend somebody but um you know particularly with um thops there's a benefit to starting early there's a benefit to saying I've got my data labeled and taged well I've got my cloud monitoring under control I've got I've got things implemented so that I for any business um you can start learning about how you're using your Cloud resources you can start optimizing you can start avoiding waste and so the earlier you can start on that the better the other thing I would say is sometimes just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it because just AWS for example launches a thousand different products each year do you really want to be an expert on cost control across that entire environment the same with Google they're they're always launching um new products and there's always new stuff is that the best use of your time is just monitoring costs for your organization or do you want to leverage someone who does it all day every day and there's economies of scale and there's there's benefits in that learning um you know we we see a lot of people really getting sucked into this internally they become the the internal Cloud cost Zar and that wasn't really what they were hired for um and that's who we love to team up with and and become their advisor and help them kind of report back to the business because there is a component um where knowing the business and knowing how they're operating is important that's when the call us is is when you're overwhelmed with that and and we love to help and we love to become a part of that team is there a benchmark that you might be able to share with me in where you've seen a client's Cloud cost go from X to Y obviously the more money you spend the more opportunities there are for for cost savings there's also kind of an inflection point we found when clients are spending more than $10,000 a month it's really hard um without Automation and and tooling to to manage that there's there's kind of a typ point where it just gets out of control 10 20 30% generally is um you know our kind of promise that we can save but it generally depends on what they're doing how they're doing it if we'd like to reach out we as in the consumer audience the cios out there who are listening and saying this has been something I need to learn more about how can we engage with Lucid point to be able to get started marabel sure well you can always go to our website lucid point.io you can reach us um our our sales team if you're interested at sales luid point.io phenomenal thank you both so much for your time today and I appreciate it I hope to have you back here in the future thanks again to Mike and marabel for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on our website Channel insider.com and watch on YouTube at Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to these episodes in podcast format on your favorite podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode we put out new videos and podcasts every week don't forget you can also connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter at Channel Insider or with me Katie boso once again I'm your host Katie boso and I'll see you next time n

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