 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital edition. I'm Lisa Martin, and with me is Eugene Kovostov, VP of Product and Engineering at Aptio. Eugene, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me, Lisa. So talk to our audience a little bit about Aptio. What is it that you guys do help them understand that? Yeah, absolutely. Aptio provides leading tools for technology business management. We help our customers understand their technology costs, where they're spending money, where they're not spending money, and how they can optimize those and help translate that into the language of whether you're a business person or a finance person or working directly in the technology department, you all can come together and understand what your technology costs are and where they're headed in the future. And then we also provide some tools for you to dive deeper into your cloud specific costs, for example. Speaking of cloud costs, one of the things that is happening that we all know is that cloud spend has never been more important because of all the changes, the surge in SaaS applications and our price cloud with everybody shifting to work from home. Talk to me about some of the trends that you're seeing. Yeah, it's really interesting to see, right? It's an interesting time. And as we see more and more folks come online, working from home, consuming digital products, we're seeing the demand really grow for, well, cloud services and the services that our customers consume to provide that digital content. However, at the same time, those customers are being asked to do more with less, less resources, less spending on resources but providing more information, more data, more content. So it's in that world that we look to help our customers as much as possible, achieve those goals. How do I make sure that my dollar goes as far as possible on my infrastructure spend with AWS? I get the tremendous benefit of elasticity and flexibility with my cloud resources from AWS. And how do I make sure that I'm using my dollar on the right set of resources that my teams are looking at the right set of products or discount models that can allow them to save more money as they consume more of those services. AWS provides some really great opportunities to do just that. We are the ones who look to help you achieve that with AWS. So customers that are asked to be, do more with less, but also companies that need more technical capabilities, how does app do help that trade off, that balance? Yes, it's definitely a balance. And it's one that we look to help folks with, even folks that aren't our customers necessarily, right? We're one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation. We provide our own content as well where you can simply consume and understand what is it that you're gonna get from AWS in terms of your cost and usage data? What are you gonna see when you get your bill? How can you consume that and more efficiently process that information so that you can, again, make your dollar go further? Again, there's tremendous benefits with cloud, but that also means that you get a lot more data with the consumption that you have. Tens of thousands, millions of rows of data because you can actually spin up and spin down resources as you see fit, means that you have more data to process and more data to consume. So it's imperative. It's really important that you understand how to look at that data, how to process it, and then how to make decisions from that data. And that really boils down to the cloud financial management practices because you have to look at it as both the technologist and the financial lens that you have from the cost that are coming from those data. So let's unpack that because as we talk about data is the new goal, that's oil, it is if organizations can harness it and extract insights quickly as possible, make to your point decisions in real time that affect the business. And so many businesses the last nine months have had to pivot multiple times to get to how do we survive this? How do we thrive during this? So how does AppDeo help customers be able to leverage the power of cloud to get access to all that data but also really manage their cloud financials? Yeah, we've got a few ways to help you with that. We have tools like Cloudability which provide the ability to dive into your data, get that process from AWS and then we'll actually visualize that for you. So instead of you having to go into those gargantuan data files you actually can get that right in front of you in the tool and share that with your internal stakeholders. So it's important that you share the information. It's not just about Lisa knowing what she spent on cloud costs. It's about the entire organization knowing what each part is consuming and subsequently spending. The other bit of it is making sure you're not overspending. You mentioned it, right? There's a lot more demand on cloud resources but that means that you need to be really careful that you're not overspending, you're not over provisioning both in the resources you use meaning using a resource that might be too large for the application or workload you're running or not taking advantage of all the great commitment based products that AWS provides to you. Cloudability seeks to help you do that but we also have and are expanding on that suite of products because we view it as more than just the infrastructure you have with AWS. It's also the SaaS products, the software, the service that you are using to help run your cloud services. We give you the ability with Cloudability SaaS to look at that data as well and look at all the applications you use to run those services. So Cloudability and the Cloudability SaaS, well, I'm just curious as things have evolved so much the last few months as I mentioned how is your conversation within a customer organization changing? Like has your target audience changed for Cloudability? Are they now, is it now at the C-suite or your target audience now going, we need to be able to justify leveraging this tool to optimize our spend all the way up to our CEO and our board? Yeah, you know, that's an interesting point. We're definitely seeing more eyes on cloud spend as it becomes a larger proportion of your real technology spend, right? After you as a whole has been very used to having eyes on our product and our data at the C-suite level. But that's because it was the overall technology spend. Now as cloud becomes a bigger and bigger portion of that spend, the SaaS becomes a bigger and bigger portion of that spend worldwide technology spend is going to approach $4 trillion and SaaS and infrastructure and service are the fastest growing segments of that spend. So we get more of those eyeballs. We also get more of the, well, hey Eugene, prove to me why it's worth it. Why should we move to the cloud? Why should we move our workloads to the cloud? Because we think we get it, we hear a lot about it but show me in hard dollars, in hard data why is that valuable? Why is that important for us? And what is the ROI that I'm going to realize from that? And that's what we seek to do. That's what we do pretty well. And what we also look to do is to be able to drive that information down into the organization as well. It's not just enough to explain to the C-suite why it's a high ROI overall. It's important to empower folks within the organization to actually achieve that ROI. That's a very important part of it as well. So we really look at it that way. That's a great point that you make. It's not just about justifying the, these cloud cost management and optimization or CCMO tools. It's about empowering the individuals to be able to use them to extract that value. That's a great point that you brought up. So let's dig into that ROI a little bit more. Like, how are you helping AWS customers contain their costs? And what are some of the ROI figures that you're seeing? We're seeing great results from our customers. We do it in primarily three ways. We talked about visibility, just simply being able to see what you're spending on or what your teams are consuming. The second is actually providing proactive recommendations for you. What can you do with reservations or savings plans in AWS? What's the optimal point at which you can commit and get a high ROI for the commitment you're making to AWS for one or three years? What are the resources you're running and which ones are over provisioned? Which ones are unattached or idle? We're able to actually highlight that for you. The third way is actually providing proactive and only detection. We run our own algorithms and determine when and where we're seeing spend or usage that doesn't really fit your historical patterns. And we highlight those for you. Now it may be that you expected this and this was something that you knew was coming. You're launching a new product in a new market or maybe you've got higher demand for your services because you're a media company and there's a lot of media being consumed recently. But we will still highlight it for you. And we've been able to find many instances where you're actually unaware of that spend and that anomaly that we detected is something that you can stop right at the source. So given this sort of urgency that we're all living in, how quickly, and from a turnaround timeframe, can you work with customers to show them proactively, these are all the areas in which you were overspending, underspending, and this is where you need to optimize? What's the customer looking for in terms of timeframe to make that impact? Well, if you ask a customer, they probably say real time, right away. And we come pretty darn close to that. We do it throughout the month. So historically, folks who are consuming infrastructure are very used to, we know what we're spending. We bought this server many years ago, we're depreciating it, and we know exactly what we're spending for that month. But with the cloud, you're actually getting that bill in real time. You're getting your estimated charges every day, every hour. And we're right there with you, looking at that data as it goes by. So that's what customers are really looking for. Now, there's some things that you won't get right away, there's some things that come in on your monthly invoices or things that you'll see that we help you allocate and understand who's spending where. But by and large, we actually do this right at the time that you're seeing this data come through. And that's really important. The real-time nature of it, the ability to look at your cost and usage and who is actually using it is critical to your success. Otherwise, things can run away pretty quickly. It is absolutely critical. And it's kind of one of those things as consumers, we've sort of had this on-demand expectation for so long. And now with things changing so quickly in organizations, having to make so many pivots and probably continue to do so, being able to have that visibility, that insight in real time, make decisions on it is critical because there's very likely a competitor right in the rear of your mirror that might be smaller and more agile and kind of willing and ready to come in and kind of bulldoze down. So with that said, how and as things continue to change, and I think we can expect that for a while longer, as we approach the year 2021, how do you advise organizations to think about cloud in the context of their overall technology spend? Yeah, that's a great question. The first is to think of it more than just a budget lineup. It's more than just an entry in your general ledger of spending this much money. It's really about driving the growth of your organization and making sure that you drive the optimal growth in the resources and infrastructure and software that you consume in order to increase your own growth. The second is to actually plan for it. There's this sort of feeling that folks get when I talked to them that they can't really plan for cloud spend, right? It's just going to happen. What my organization can consume is what they're going to consume. But that couldn't be further from the truth. You can plan for your cloud spend. You can look at the demand for your resources. You can plan for different scenarios and what might happen in the future as you put it. And you can actually look at that yourself. You can also look at tools like planability demand and the AppDeo Suite. You can look at cloudability itself to forecast that demand. You can actually plan for it. So don't be daunted by, well, it's a lot of data. I'm not sure what's going to happen. It's just going to, we're just going to roll with it as it happens, right? You need to be able to plan for it. You need to be proactive with it. And you need to understand what you might spend depending on what, well, the economy does, what the world does, what your customers at the end of the day do. Great advice that you can plan for it and you should plan for it and be proactive. I think all of us could use a little bit of that in our lives. Eugene, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today, talking about AppDeo and the big impact that you're making at organizations across the globe. Lisa, thank you very much for having me. My pleasure. For Eugene, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.