Video: How Vega Cloud Helps MSPs Solve Cloud Billing Errors

it's a great application for getting a handle on how you're spending your money in the cloud hey Channel insiders I'm your host Katie boso and welcome to this episode of partner POV brought to you by Vega Cloud as managing and reselling Cloud environments and services becomes more complex the last thing any managed service provider wants is for tracking and manag ing revenue and costs to become more complicated that's why Vega Cloud introduced Vega for msps a simplified platform purpose-built for msps to help them spend less time on the books and more time solving business challenges for customers joining me to explain how msps can make more money with fewer Financial headaches is director of finops Larry cusk and co-founder and CEO Chris bner of Vega Cloud welcome gentle great to see you thanks Kitty thanks Katie thank you so much let's start by getting a detailed overview of what Vega cloud and Vega for msps actually is Larry can you explain how the platform works and what it does sure thanks the Vega Cloud platform is a Enterprise grade finops SAS solution that lets customers optimize their Cloud spend uh enhanced Financial accountability and drive operational efficiency we takes in their CSP billing and usage information and it provides cost reporting cost anomaly uh detection actionable right sizing uh it helps identifying potential billionaires this is across AWS Azure gcp oci snowflake data bricks the MSP specific offering is built on top of our normal platform but it is designed to focus on MSP specific challenges such as dealing with reating billing reconciliation providing visibility not only for the MSP but also for their customers so msps can see their spend they can see their customers spend and then their customers can drill down into their spend see cost savings uh recommendations with their own portals so it's a great application for getting a handle on how you're spending your money in the cloud I agree definitely a lot of transparency which is something that's very necessary when you already have so much to do as we know msps do now Chris I'm going to go over to you for this next question Vega Cloud introduced updates to Vega for msps at AWS reinvent but it's been available for a year now Vega for msps was born out of necessity after you'd been seeing Financial operations challenges in the managed service provider space in fact Chris the last company you founded prior to Vega was an MSP for AWS so you know what you're talking talking about walk me through the problems and challenges you saw with msps struggling to optimize their billing revenue and costs why is this a growing issue and what's contributing to it one of the challenges we saw from a provider perspective operating an MSP in the cloud was Cloud was continuing to get more and more complex over time so Amazon was continuing to innovate add more and more services I think they're up to over 200 different services today you add in Google Microsoft Azure Oracle now just a lot of moving parts to manage and part of the challenge is that's all over the place right people call them different things they they meter and monitor them differently even within the cloud provider so it's it's a really struggle to get your brain around how all these parts work and move together what we found in the marketplace even from from the days of forming Vega was that there wasn't really a good platform for folks that were doing this at scale we tried the industry standard platforms out there and we couldn't use them for the top 10 customers we had because they really couldn't scale they weren really weren't thinking about this from a data perspective the way that an operator would and so one of the things that's unique about Vega is that almost all of the team has an operator background we're all fop certified and so it allows us to bring that experience with us to build a platform the reason why we started with Enterprises first before msps was that we wanted to make sure that we were getting the scale problem right because if you don't fix that first it's hard to then scale up to an MSP perspective so we got the individual product right and then we decided you know what now it's time we we always knew we were going to release something for msps because that's that's obviously our background and and where our passion is and so we want to make sure that we can provide a much better platform a better price point and also just a better business model I think that's the other struggle here is that manag service providers are are challenged with cogs in general um because you're you're licensing so many different tools to operate your business today and you're piecing things together with with either scripting or other things and so with meega you can retire three or four tools with one platform and we're not a percentage of spend biller so as you grow your business you're not penalized for the growth you actually get more margin you you get more profitable over time with the Vega platform that's not the case with any product in the market today and so we're super excited to to be a part of partnering with our customers and making sure that we've got their best interest at hand Chris everything you just mentioned is so important but you said a number to me in the past as far as the individual billing configurations that you've seen msps come through the door with can you let our audience know exactly how many of these configurations independent to each customer that each of these msps is typically dealing with what's an average number or maybe the highest number that you've seen yeah in the hundreds for sure in distinct billing configurations and and I think what's interesting about that is that you've got a lot of challenges in in Billing cloud in general having come from that market we understand it and know it really well and it's easy to make mistakes right with all these different complicated services and moving parts um it's easy to underbuild clients or overbuild them and so you want to make sure that you've got a solid rock solid platform you've qced everything tied it out to the penny you've got uh an invoice and and a Reconciliation process to do all that and that's kind of how we're coming at the problem is making sure that one we can support creative ways for you to build um because we want to make sure that you have the opportunity to make money we know that the cloud providers don't always make that easy on MSB so we want to make sure that you can use whatever charging model you want and do R Arbitrage whatever you want to do to be able to continue to make money on on resell or MSP and then be able to support those custom configurations Chris in addition to everything you just said when you have five minutes to really drill into the differentiators of Vega Cloud what makes Vega Cloud stand out from competitors in the finop space yeah there's a couple of key things and we talked about it up front but we're built by operators for operators we're the only software platform that's actually built from experienced folks and that's why when you come to Vega it's going to look radically different it's not a piece of bi software that you know you have to build a thousand customer reports with it's actually built exactly the way you would build it yourself if you were an operator because that's the background we come from so it's very verticalized in terms of how we think about it and then the other big piece for us is that a lot of folks just hand over software and so that's okay but in a complicated World it becomes shelfware right if I keep seeing more and more recommendations I can't do anything about I can't silence them I don't know every single service that Amazon has how do I how am I an expert about it and so I get this recommendation I don't know what to do with it I have nobody to talk to because I'm just using their software that's not helpful so we actually have a monthly check-in with every single one of our customers allows them to ask questions get unstuck in the process right so that if you have a recommendation in the tool you're not familiar with it you want to ask questions you want to get unstuck you want to give us feedback whatever it might be that allows us to have a much more ingrained partnership approach which is radically different and then the third one that I would talk about is the data side so data fuels everything that we do and a lot of cloud providers will just pull in data put it back into pretty charts and graphs and expose that to the customers the problem with that is that the data is not always clean the cloud providers don't always get it right it's not always in the format that you want to see it you're doing R Arbitrage as an MSP or you're doing other things that make it hard to see what's actually going on are you under billing are you overbilling you want to have some reconciliation around that so getting the data right in the first place curating that data and making sure it's accurate s us to make sure that all the recommendations are accurate all your charts and graphs are accurate we have all that data and so it's just a different approach I think in terms of again ensuring that we're really focused on on the clean experience here really good points there Chris and thank you so much for that answer Larry we're going to turn back to you for this question which is honestly one of my favorite that I get to ask what is an example in which you were able to help an MSP make or save more money thanks to Vega for msps yeah that's a great question so Chris mentioned one a minute ago you know being able to combine tools our uh pricing model Etc but I think one of the most interesting to me is We on boarded and MSP who like most MSP had a lot of manual processes they have an existing tool in the market they were exporting spreadsheets from that platform to do their monthly billing and as you can imagine once you export to a spreadsheet and you allow a bunch of people to make changes uh there's going to be mistakes so we took those billing configurations that Chris mentioned a minute ago automated them within the platform and when we sat down during the onboarding and did a comparison between what we believed a specific month's bill to the customer should be and what they had calculated we' found out that they were under billing their customers by about $360,000 per month so that's quite a big number some customers were being over bu a little bit some of them were being underu a little bit but once we automated that and met with a billing team and walked through all the logic that they now no longer had to go do and spreadsheets every month that really became clear this mistake became clear we provided all the backup data to them and now every month their billing is much more accurate much less manual which frees up those teams to go work on new incentives that they're working on within their business uh new Services they're trying to sell instead of uh messing around in spreadsheets and and producing manual bills and who wants to spend their day on spreadsheets I totally agree great point there Larry obviously as a business the MSP does not want to have difficult billing conversations about financial data with the customers so how do you help msps avoid explaining those billing errors that Vega helps them find to their customers yeah let's first identify there are two types of billing errors there's the one I just described from the MSP through no fault of their own we have now solved that by automated their billing process and they shouldn't have that in the future but the other type of billionaire we see is from the cloud providers themselves as they add more services and more ways to charge for those Services they can often make mistakes when charging their end customer so what Vega does is we calculate what we believe that invoice should be compare it to the cloud provider's invoice and in one of our tabs called the finance tab there's a billing reconciliation dashboard that shows a Delta between the csp's bill and what we calculate it to be we will describe in detail where the mistake took place for example the customer was supposed to get a uh 7% discount on support but they only got a 5 and a half% discount so we provide all the detail information to allow the customer whether it be an MSP or a regular customer to go open a ticket with the CSP provide the detail information and if they need us to we're happy to hop on a phone call with uh the C CSP and explain the difference we have found so this doesn't happen to every customer every month but it does happen often enough that it's something we want to make sure that we are looking for another differentiating factor for Vega and this is huge for msps is that when that happens so when the cloud provider issues a credit to the End customer the problem you have then is that you have to explain both the credit so you've got this dip now in financials maybe that was going for 3 months so it added up to a bigger number than it should have been and then your historics are wrong well none of the cloud providers and none of the other tools fix that um so you're just explaining these weird things for a 13-month roving sort of Finance window doing corly reviews or whatever we fix two things we can peanut bar the credit we can put it in a separate account do whatever you want with it so it doesn't show up in front and center for CFOs to ask what is that because it's just a billing error and then we can also fix the historics we do this for tagging we do this for billing errors all kinds of things to make sure that we can actually go back to the instance where that resource actually got created and make sure that it's accurate and so being able to make sure the historics are accurate make sure that we can then do better forecasting better recommendations all that kind of stuff and you're actually getting accurate data in your your dashboards and your reporting Chris let's talk more about those msps who is this platform designed for can smaller msps use it or is it better for those Enterprise level ones yeah we we have large msps and small msps on the platform platform today um I would say it's very typical to our standard Enterprise um which is if you have about $5 million of spend under management and above we're a great solution for you so if you're smaller than that then there's lots of great either internal tools from the cloud providers or other things you you don't typically have multicloud at that stage like you there's just a lot of problems that um you're not going to have yet that Vega sols really really well I'd say kind of in that five million to $10 million range is kind of our beginning point and then we go all the way up into the the nine figures and so we can support you along that Journey again because we're not a percentage of Bill as you grow your business you're not going to pay more for the the Vega Cloud platform thank you so much Chris and Larry back over to you how quickly can an MSP get Vega for msps up and running in their environment and of course how easy is it for them to navigate from there yeah we try to make it as simple as possible for the msps to on board with us we have an MSP specific migration framework that provides temp for the business rules we've been talking about for tagging uh for any sort of metadata information that needs to come within the platform they can connect via SSO with Sam or OCTA and as long as they can run a couple of scripts in their cloud provider environments to get us the billing and usage information we can get that data within the platform within days for example we onboarded a MSP last summer that had 500 customers we got that done in less than two months so we try to do as much of the work on the our side and make it easy for the msps and then once they're in the platform we can provide training whether it's MSP specific training or enduser customer training and make sure that they are navigating and as comfortable with the platform uh as they can be we have great online documentation online scripts they can walk through to get familiar with the platform and of course as Chris mentioned we have those monthly meetings to make sure everybody is getting what they need from the platform and let's talk more about those monthly meetings as an example of how you stay with that MSP even after that deployment so how does vega cloud and the team maintain that partnership with the MSP after the deployment like I said what does the ongoing support look like from there and of course we've mentioned this a few times but I think it Bears repeating I have to tell you this is actually the favorite part of my job because I've come from other companies where we don't do this we really stay in close contact with those companies I'm going to use a real life example Mission Cloud a great customer of ours of course every customer has a dedicated customer success manager and the fops me that we've mentioned in the past they have access to Open tickets with us whether it's through the platform through a a different portal or through email but we hold weekly office hours where anybody can come in whether it's MSP or their customers and ask for help ask us any question they want it can be about the platform it can be about fofs in general it could be a general Cloud question we deal with the m all so we want to be able to um get them as comfortable as can be and we also hold uh the trainings I talked about earlier we also have a monthly brown bag with their CTO and other Executives within their company to talk about Partnerships how can we help each other how do we integrate better to make it easier for their customers to not only access our data but access the msps data and then for key players within the organization we have a slack channel so we could they can immediately reach out to us on any issues they need help with very nice and very involved I I like the brown bag lunch that you mentioned I think that when you operate something like that people are bound to come especially if they hear the word lunch involved so very good news there and now Chris back over to you thinking about the future what does the future of Vega cloud and Vega for msps look like and can we expect any further updates as we go through this year absolutely we're we're a product driven company we do a lot of updates we're publishing new releases every month new recommendations for optimization opportunities um what you're going to see from us in the short term is deeper kubernetes integration so folks that are running kubernetes at scale we can help manage that at a detail level we've actually open sourced a kubernetes agent so you can actually install our metrics agent on your cluster pull back more data uh and allow you to do more analysis those kinds of things we're going to continue to to drive workflow automation for msps so Larry talked a little bit about some of the work that we're doing to automate billing we're going to continue to do more in that space every MSP I talked to billing is a hassle uh it's a pain in the butt uh it takes forever the errors are costly uh as we've talked about or can be and so you want to make sure you you have it automated you have it correct um and you're getting it in your workflow and you're not spending hours and hours and hours every month uh closing out the month so we want to make that easier for msps that's a big point of our issue this year and then we're also working on helping customers migrate from other existing platforms as well when folks find us um one of the interesting things about Vega is that our net promoter score from 2024 is 67 I'd Hazard a guess that the closest competition in the MSP space is under zero we don't see people that are in love with the software that they're using for lots of reasons right they don't have the the human being support that Larry talked about they don't have uh the right focus of hey this was built by software Engineers instead of manag services people like how do I use this um so there's a lot of missing pieces and and people don't love their existing platforms and that's different with Vega and so we're going to continue to drive and listen to customers build customer requested features those kinds of things I keep hearing nightmares of people uh implementing support requests for feature request and and waiting for years to hear back on what's going on and that's just not customer focused right and I think one of the things I I love about Vega is that we have a very customer focused sort of culture here and you'll you'll hear that from from everybody and so we're going to continue to to build on top of that for msps well I love to hear that and for any msps that are listening and watching right now and they're thinking these are challenges I'm facing where can they go to learn more and get started with Vega for msps yeah they can go to our website vac cloud. which has an MSP specific page with data sheets white papers infographics all around msps the challenges they face and how Vega can help them address that and they're always allowed to reach out to me Larry Vega cloud. and I'll be happy to answer any questions Larry Chris thank you both so much for your time today I really appreciated getting to learn more about Vega cloud and Vega for msps and thanks to you at home 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

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