 We're starting a monthly series here called TFIR Topic of the Month or T3M. The idea of the series is to take a pulse of the ecosystem of the industry and then bring together experts to deep dive into these topics. I sit down with C-level executives, analysts, engineers and experts to explore these topics and then bring these discussions to you. And today we have with us Tim Kevin, Dectar of Sales at Keri Group. Tim, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. What are some of the broader trends you are seeing in the market when it comes to cost cutting or the way we look at it as companies are trying to become more cost effective? Yeah, so I think when you think of the phases of cost cutting or cost optimization, you have to look at it both from the macro and the micro. So, important to understand that like cloud is still in the very early days, what cloud will look like in the next few years, very different from what it is today. To talk about cost optimization, you have to kind of go back in time a little bit. Back to the early 2000s when the term cloud computing was starting to be thrown around to discuss how technologists were making large scale computing power available to more users. And then in the early 2000s, too, that was the birth of SAS. So folks didn't really know that cloud was a thing or that it existed, but it did. It was Salesforce and Zendesk and ServiceNow. That was kind of the first phase of cost optimization, not having to build software entirely on your own, but instead being able to license it from someone else so you could use it. That next big wave in phase, which is still relevant today, was kind of that 2006 to 2014, 2015 era. That was the birth of EC2. And that whole phase was more about cost effective server virtualization, all about infrastructure. Bring your stuff into My Data Center, a co-located data center, or some of the early cloud providers, and we'll run it cheaper for you. Your cost optimization make My Data Center more efficient. Where we see cloud now and where it's going is much more about how do you create, how does cloud create a differentiating capability for my business? That's the next phase of cost optimization. And that tends to be the biggest thing organizations are focusing on today. So enabling a healthcare provider with the right tools and data so that they can build services and products that help them treat patients more precisely. Or even on the retail front, helping retailers build a differentiated and unique omni-channel experience across not only their digital properties, but their store footprint, so they can help serve customers better. So the unique differentiators are really more of the future of cloud and in the biggest cost discussion we have today. And really the real ROI for organizations adopting the cloud at scale. So we find our customers are asking much more about that. Like how can cloud positively impact my business to drive differentiated value rather than how can cloud help me save money by replatforming my technology stack? Teams are also getting affected due to cost cutting. What kind of cultural impact do you think is going to be there on the organizations due to this layoff and the smaller teams? Approaching costs maybe in two different ways in terms of what's important organizations and the discussions we have. The first is just this whole paradigm and it's probably more infrastructure focused on getting to the cloud, finding efficiencies, and then modernizing and making that better and more efficient. The second is delivering differentiated value. Those are probably the two phases that we think about in layoffs and in culture are pertinent to both. Within that first paradigm, the first phase of cloud is just getting there, taking your current stuff, getting it over to a cloud provider. The second phase is changing how you're doing things. So running services more efficiently. In the third phase is more about modernizing for the cloud. So you can take advantage of just in time as I need compute storage and networking. In that paradigm, we can help organizations in a number of ways. Identifying architecture patterns that might be wasteful or inefficient in helping to re-architect those. Integrating more cloud-native tooling into your stack that could be more cost effective than the current, whether it's managed services, platform-native tools versus internally homegrown tools, or even optimizing your fleet of VMs. On top of that, and this comes into layoffs and organizations potentially running more lean these days. It's really important not to get wrapped around the whole axle of compute storage and networking as the only cost considerations when you're talking about cloud. You can over-optimize for infrastructure costs and you can completely ignore what's the most important cost, and that's gonna be developer time. So we help with infrastructure needs, but making developers more efficient, more productive is where we probably lean in the most. Developers sitting around and waiting for code pushes to production, not a very efficient use of time or cost. So we can certainly help improve these processes and we can help improve the overall cost basis when you think about cost as a whole. Drive more agility and productivity for an organization and really ensure that we're kind of removing the sand and the gears in terms of getting organizations from phase one, which is getting to the cloud, to phase two, which is running more efficiently. The second, in where we spend more of our time, is gonna be that using cloud is a differentiator. And that's what we get really excited about, to be honest. It's embedding with customer engineering teams to help build platforms that allow engineers to focus on creating better services that drive productivity. And then taking these environments and providing them to developers to make them more productive so that they can innovate and build products or roll out features and functionalities faster and more efficiently. All of that, that whole life cycle, drives growth, it drives innovation, it drives revenue for the business. So that's what gets us most excited about the cost conversation right now. Can you talk about how our credit customers dealing with this cost cutting, cost efficiency challenge, and how is credit helping them in their journey? So the biggest challenge we see customers having when trying to find cost efficiency in the cloud is really more about transforming people in the process side of their business as they re-platform to different technology. Helping your people operate differently with new tech and then modifying the structure of your org to fit within those new cloud technology capabilities. For example, data center lead times and costs are just different than the cloud. They resulted in treating IT as a fixed cost that needed to be optimized. And when changes needed to take place, sometimes they were run as projects. And depending on the size of the change, it could last for years. Data center native capabilities have been a competitive advantage. However, a whole new category of new tools and techniques were created to overcome some of those inherent constraints. In these cloud native technologies are allowing organizations to embrace change much more quickly, redeploy technology more quickly, which allows companies to focus on IT more as a variable cost, which is more closely aligned to value. And that unlocks on a number of things, but one of the biggest is being able to adopt a product mindset. So improving product continuously and rapidly, instead of having potentially years long projects. And the challenge is data center native patterns have been incredibly successful for a long time. All that's built up a good amount of inertia that needs to be overcome if you want to embrace cloud technology at scale. It's one thing to replatform infrastructure and take advantage of on-demand compute storage and networking. But if you really want the benefits of cloud, you need to be willing to change your operational structure, your processes, your workflows in a way that compliments cloud technology for data center native patterns. That's probably the biggest challenge we see and that's where Carrick's helping quite a bit. We've got 60 years of Google Cloud experience. We've built expertise around understanding and helping companies in that journey. And that's what we're committed to continuing to do. What advice do you have for companies to become more cost-efficient while also remain competitive and innovative? When you think about cloud and you think about cost, you have to think about it in a few different ways. And it's important not to get tunnel vision in the first, which is that first phase that I spoke about of just moving to the cloud, running more efficient, and then optimizing for the cloud. You have to think about it in terms of infrastructure cost and that first paradigm. Second is how is developer productivity and developer time as a cost being incorporated into my cloud strategy? And third and really the future of cost considerations is, what are these cloud investments doing to my business in terms of creating differentiated value? I think if you've got a well-rounded perspective and you think about cost in cloud and those three paradigms, you're touching on all the important things that you need to be thinking about when you make these large-scale transformations. Tim, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about cost-cutting, cost optimization, becoming more and more cost efficient. Thanks for sharing those insights. And I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.