IBM Cloudability

As my company has been moving into the cloud one of the biggest concerns we have had is cost. While all the different tools out there in the cloud are amazing and leaps and bounds most if not all things come with a price tag. Subsequently my organization needed a way to be able to manage cloud cost, how to optimize return on investment and also financial accountability in terms of visibility for our internal teams and spending control as well. This tool has helped bring to light dollar value to specific cloud tools we have implemented and the true cost.

IBM Cloudability has been a solid addition to our FinOps toolkit, especially for getting real contorl over multi-cloud spend and making engineering teams accountable for their usage. In our case, Cloudability finally gave us a single, turstworthy view of AWS and Azure costs that finance, platform and product teams could look at without arguing over whose spreadsheet was "more correct". It pulls in detailed cost and usage data, normalizes it, and lets us slice it by account, tag, application or business unit, which is exactly what we needed to run a proper FinOps practice instead of ad-hoc reporting. Before Cloudability, our mult-cloud setup had classic chaos, like non-production workloads running 24/7, idle instances left behind after POCs and no consistent way to show product teams what they were actually spending. Cloudability highlighted idle and underused resources and surfaced rightsizing and shutdown recommendations across our main cloud providers which translated into double-digit percentage savings in the first year without impacting performance.

My overall experience with IBM Cloudability has been positive. The onboarding process was relatively straightforward and easy, not proving to be overly complicated. From a value measurement perspective, the product's primary business goal revolves around financial optimization, which includes achieving reduced costs and enabling proactive measures to lower our overall cloud expenditures. The integration of this tool has significantly enhanced our workflow by providing much-needed transparency into our cloud consumption. This transparency, in turn, has allowed us to implement specific actions aimed at optimizing that consumption, such as the strategic purchase of savings plans from our various cloud vendors. The product demonstrates strong scalability with our business growth. While the solution scales effectively, a critical consideration that prospective customers must be aware of is the cost model. This model is typically based on the consumption monitored by the tool, meaning that significant growth in cloud consumption could potentially impact the overall cost of the tool itself. However, aside from this financial consideration, we have not needed to undertake any major upgrades, expansions, or significant modifications to the solution. Our decision to purchase this product was driven by several key factors. The top priorities included cost management and the goal of creating internal operational efficiencies. Beyond these, product functionality and performance, coupled with a robust roadmap and future vision from the vendor, were crucial determinants in our decision-making process. During the evaluation phase, we undertook a comprehensive process. This involved conducting an RFP (Request for Proposal) with several different vendors and engaging in a detailed assessment that spanned several weeks. A significant component of our evaluation was a Proof of Concept (POC), which allowed us to observe how the tool would integrate and function within our environment, evaluate the implementation effort required, and assess the platform's overall usability. Regarding internal adoption within our organization, we proactively established an overall practice supported by a dedicated team. This team's mission is to assist our internal customers in the adoption and successful utilization of the tool. This approach underscores our commitment to not merely rolling out technology but also providing the essential support structure necessary for widespread and effective adoption. The deployment architecture of IBM Cloud ability is cloud-based. Our internal team responsible for the deployment and ongoing management of this solution is geographically dispersed across Switzerland, and the United States.

The tool has successfully grounded our FinOps culture and delivered measurable savings. However, to move from basic cost tracking to truly AI powered digital operations, we expwct more proactive automation and predictive insights. We are looking for more Agentic AI festures.

account team is great, but the product is not keeping up with changes in technology in support of FinOps best practices