How to save 30-40% on AWS, Azure, GCP

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage

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Welcome to the Did You know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow, especially bring awareness to smarter, better or faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.3s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with various source. And welcome to another episode of the Did you know Podcast. Today I have one of my favorite suppliers and partners called Kion, and we're going to have Brian Price, who is the CEO and cofounder of Kion with us. But Kyan essentially is a single platform for setup, provisioning, financial management and compliance for AWS, Azure and GCP. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Victor, thanks so much for having me on. Excited to share a little bit about who we are and our story today?

Yeah, for sure. A lot of exciting questions for you, obviously, and Cloud is such a hot topic. It's the future, but it's also one of the hardest things to manage, right? And so just tons of questions for you and glad to know that we also have a connection in the DC Virginia area as well. But before I kind of kick it off to you to kind of introduce yourself, the reason why I said you guys are one of my favorite partners is because I think with their source, our entire vision was to build a platform that consolidates, saving, buying and managing of technology in general. 1.7s You know, for clients in a single platform. And what I love about you guys is you're combining three or four. Again, the setup, the provisioning, financial management and compliance all in one platform, which is incredible. So with that said, love to hear a little bit about your founding journey background. Like why how AHA moment, why did you create time? 1s It's a great question. So a little bit about us as a company. So as Victor alluded to, we're headquartered outside of Washington DC. But now have folks really scattered all throughout the United States. But this journey really began even before we set up, you know, kind of kayon as a company, almost five, a little over five, five, six years ago now. We started, you know, seeing first hand some of the challenges organizations were facing as they started to migrate tons of workloads to the cloud. So we were originally actually a part of a company about 100 person, little small systems integrator government contractor. And we're working with a couple of key customers that had really lofty visions. And what they were trying to do is say, okay, well, what if we literally empower every engineer inside of our organization with the power of the cloud, right? So they can just have self service access to provision the workloads and the infrastructure they need to solve really tough challenges. Well, that's a great idea, but with the space and the challenges that power kind of gives you, there's some things you have to really consider around giving every developer a data center that costs something per minute or per hour that resources are running, which most people at the time really didn't understand. Right. Most folks were very accustomed to. I could just get a new, larger virtual machine in a virtual data center and really there wasn't as much of that kind of pay per use kind of cost. The other side, obviously on a compliance perspective, while there's tons of availability scalability the cloud offers, there was some real challenges for organizations to be able to say, hey, there's consistent baselines that could be applied across accounts. And frankly, we started working very, very closely and still do with Amazon Web services. AWS. And they really kind of confirmed a lot of our hunches. And collectively together, I think gave us that kind of push to say, hey, there's a spot here in the market to not just basically give people a report

of all the problems that exist in their cloud environments, but to take a more proactive approach to set up cloud accounts. In a way that really ensures that organizations have control from day, you know, day zero, day one of that journey all the way through the entire life cycle of a cloud account, an application, etc. And that really kind of helps does See this kind of very automation centric approach that we've Baked Fully into Kion to Help Ensure Organizations have A Ton of Control In the cloud.

Yeah. 2.4s With your background, I think you guys are the perfect team to solve this problem. And our audience consists of business owners as well as procurement, finance, and it 1.2s when I look at Cloud, first of all, technology is a top three spend for every business. And then Cloud itself has become top three spend in the technology spend and also runs the business. Right. It's amazing what AWS, Azure and GCP has provided in a sense that right now, when you build a business or a platform, you can leverage so much of their technology. You don't have to build AI by yourself. You can just utilize the AI from AWS that they build that is going to be 100 times better than you can build it, but just leverage their technology. So those things about Cloud is tremendous. However, one of the main topics that I want to ask you about for your knowledge and pick your brain is around the cost management, financial management of cloud because talking to a lot of clients that market are at enterprise. I see that obviously cloud is very important to their whole business. But why is it so difficult to 2.7s a lot of people look at this cloud as a black hole. Right? And why is it so difficult? Difficult to manage that you think, for these companies. 1.2s

Well. So I think a couple things really come to mind, one of which is again with the thing that victory you kind of said there around the innovation opportunity that the cloud offers. One of the realities of that is 1.1s to do that well, you have to create very simple, easy access to create, scale and grow infrastructure inside of each of these cloud kind of providers and their platforms. And that ease of use just unfortunately, there isn't something that for most, it's built in out of the box that says, hey, once you get over a certain threshold now we're going to really start 1.7s now we're going to really start to have situations in the environment where, frankly, you have to have better control around what people are doing. In some cases just better visibility. Each of the cloud providers themselves have their own tooling around budgeting, which is one facet, but they also a lot of times don't put that information at the forefront for. At the end of the day, the engineer that's actually choosing the size of infrastructure, the configuration of that infrastructure, so they understand the concept of cost when they're building applications. And unfortunately, I think as well, a lot of organizations have taken that lift and shift approach to the cloud, which if you're using on demand resources, you will never save money by moving to the cloud, right? Cloud offers a lot more innovation potential, but you have to take advantage of really the architecture, the fact that you've got such powerful new ways of building and modernizing your application architectures. And I think that for a lot of organizations, they've kind of taken like they dip their toe in, but they haven't really taken that full wholescale approach towards understanding all the implications of cost. So again, to talk a little bit about what we do within our platform, first off, we tried to put a big giant easy button around that. So if you're a project manager and could be a small startup, it could be a large Fortune 500 company here, but there are controls that you can place inside of Kaya and we call them budget enforcement actions. That not just give you an alert of going over a certain spending threshold, but instead what we actually do is allow you to invoke automation. Maybe sometimes it's just that we want to make sure that you're not using resource types that cost over a dollar or $2 an hour if they're in a sandbox or dev environment. And the other side of that is, over time, what happens a lot of times is that organizations just unfortunately accumulate, I'll say, some baggage in the cloud, right? It's unused resources, it's over provisioned 1.7s infrastructure. And all of that adds up when we go through most of our customer evaluations. And this has become, in the past probably six months, even more topical and important because everybody's looking to figure out ways they can try to save on that infrastructure cost. But we're finding customers able to save 30, 40% in just things that they are not even using, but they're not aware of it. No one's taking that step to truly look at that. And at the end of the day, while finance has a role here, finance somewhat has lost a bit of control in the cloud. You have to kind of move that up and down to your engineers to be able to have the right level of information in the context to make those decisions. And for us, that's really been the key for organizations to really, truly operate well in the cloud and control the overall cost of what that infrastructure looks like.

Yeah. So a couple golden nuggets you mentioned there. First of all, 1.3s I've been seeing this cloud optimization for the last one or two years, and with a lot of clients. And so when you say potential savings up to, first of all, 1.6s savings, anything is already like, wow, that's a lot in any product. And then you're talking about potentially 30% to 40% savings on a service that is one of your top spend, which is rare. Usually it's hard to have those two combinations, right, meaning one of the top spend, and you can save 30% to 40%. And it's relatively I wouldn't say easy, but pretty straightforward. So that's incredible. I mean, I think when companies here, that it's really mindblowing, especially when I kind of understood it. But I want to we're here to ask tough questions, and I have an interesting one for you, 1.8s because we see it on both sides as very short. So we talked to the finance procurement who want to optimize spending. Doesn't mean they want to just reduce it, but they want to optimize. They want to know what they're paying for, what is the ROI. But a lot of times, they understand that cloud is something they obviously, technically, they don't understand. And obviously, cloud engineers are very protective of, hey, I need the resource I need in order to do what I do best and build a cloud and support the business. That's like the heart, the heartbeat of the business, right? And so oftentimes, like you said, there is not a great bridge between finance and the cloud engineer. The It team, 1.3s if you can kind of specifically explain to the audience here, how can Kyan help bridge the fact that finance wants to optimize spend, but they don't want to disrupt anything? Right? They don't want to say, well, I told you to reduce cloud spending. Our service so slow, and our customers aren't happy. Right. It's that fear of, well, 1.3s they don't know. Right? So how can you help bridge that? 1s

Yeah. So it's a really good question, victor and I think for us, what we see, it all goes back to the culture of the organization and how they look at cloud. Not just hopefully being this thing that is where 1s applications are hosted now. Right. But really the culture of what that really means in terms of how the organization discusses, makes decisions and specifically the question there how finance can empower the engineering team to make better decisions. Right. Again, in a lot of cases, it's understanding the taxonomy of what the organization needs to have. I'll share a quick kind of customer story. We are working with a large organization and they basically have a mandate. Okay. We're moving everything out of data centers, moving into the cloud. And for them, one of the biggest challenges they saw was this cost control problem. And for them, at the end of the day, what they wanted to make sure happen was that from a self service perspective, the mystery of what does a budget really constitute for an engineer in a Sandbox account was something that was very easy to understand. And even when it came into how much money maybe we're going to set up for a new project that maybe is in a pre production state, that information was just very easy. So they actually built a workflow in their kind of front end workflow kind of processing system Idsm system that, in essence, allowed folks to come in, request a new Cloud account, just like they would request a laptop, just, frankly, any other It asset, and they were able to choose, do I need a small, medium, large, extra large budget for that? Depending on where that project lived in the organization, depending on what the purpose of that project was, would route that towards an approver and that approvers then would basically give a thumbs up or thumbs down. That would then make sure that they understood that that budget was kind of being held right for the use of that particular project. And then that information got transferred over to the engineers that were going to go and start to build infrastructure around that. Again, depending on the type of project, there were more financial controls than others. So again, I think a lot of this comes back to making sure that there is clear and open communication and that culture of cloud really not being something where finance needs to call somebody on a Monday morning when they see a spike and spend over the weekend right where those engineers have the tools at their fingertips. And they know that they are responsible for making sure that they're helping to keep things in check along that path. And, you know, really when you find organizations that really get that, that really empower their people, that really provide the context for them to make better decisions, that's when you really get organizations that are killing the cloud. 1.3s They're doing all the right things, they're seeing all the benefits, they're unlocking just so much potential that they would have never been able to do a traditional infrastructure.

Yeah. No, I love that. Obviously, cost savings, especially now, this current economy, and moving forward is a hot topic, but obviously cost saving is not everything 1.3s but one thing. Next question for you, Brian, is a lot, a lot of companies we talk to, they've heard of tools like Cloud Health, cloud Checker, and few other cloud something, right? And a lot of it is more traditional cloud optimization services from a long time ago. And they mainly focus on specific use cases. And I think we've all come to the realization it's not enough, right? And so kind of based on your experience in the industry, for customers that are not aware of you guys but maybe are using some other this kind of cloud optimization service, how do you guys differentiate? And the good thing for you though, is that a lot of companies we talk to still don't have anything. And so the fact that there's a lot of greenfield or for companies that do already say, you know what, I'm doing something, you know, like, I got some type of cloud optimization tool, where do you think you guys really differentiate? 1.9s

That's another great question. So some of the tools that you mentioned, honestly, because of the sea of cloud fill in the blanks was one of the reasons why last year we rebranded from Cloud Team or the Cayenne was just because it sounds so similar in the space. We actually we're just kind of facing that similarity and we've kept hearing from our customers, is the approach that we've taken is just so fundamentally different. A lot of the traditional tools that are in the space. And again, we saw this when we even said, hey, we thought it was a good idea to even go out and try to build a business around it. Are really providing reporting at its core to a small set of users that in a lot of cases don't have the context. Like you said a little bit ago, from a finance perspective, to know what's normal and what's not in terms of the cloud. Right, great. That you can slice and dice and do a lot of different reporting, but you also have to figure out how to get that information down to the people that can actually make the proper. 1.3s Types of decisions there. So, you know, again, we've taken a very, I'd say a more holistic approach. Obviously, we talk a lot about the cost control aspects of Kion, but we also do a lot with security and compliance, a ton with automation and identity management to really, at the end of the day, be that front door to the cloud for organization. So we've kind of taken this bit broader approach that I think the most tools really are out there doing. One of the other things that we do a little bit different is Chiang as a platform itself for a lot of organizations that are still a little hesitant about, hey, we're going to give us a pure SAS vendor access to our production. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Workloads client actually is deployed inside of our customers AWS Azure and Google Cloud environments. And so that provides greater degrees of integration, security and just a whole bunch of other benefits. It's very cloud native in our deployment all, as you know, infrastructure as code, cloud formation, templates to set up the infrastructure as an example in AWS, et cetera. And what we've tried to really do is kind of find that balance where at the end of the day, a customer, if they have really a high degree of regulatory compliance they have to adhere to, they can use our platform and have a ton more confidence that they're going to be able to satisfy whatever those needs are. Whether it's something like FedRAMP or again, on the healthcare side, HIPAA or PCI and others. Our platform is really designed to help them, frankly, more securely go into the cloud and adhere to, again, all the things that they need to make sure this kind of remain in check. So those are just a couple of the differentiators obviously always encourage folks that are interested in seeing first hand to reach out, go to our website, reach out. Next week, we'll actually be out at AWS Reinvent for the 500 or so folks that will be attending out there. So stop by our booth there, get a chance to see the software firsthand, meet some of our team that are absolutely awesome. I know everybody says they've got amazing people, but our company, 1s I'm very proud of that. I've never worked with a group of folks as talented as the team that we have here inside of Kayon and get a chance to experience that first hand. And I think then those differences really just start to pop off the page, even if you're earlier in your quadrant. 1.4s

Yeah, I've seen that first hand. Your team is awesome. They're responsive, they're knowledgeable, and even as a partner, they're extremely supportive. So now it's great. And I think, again, from the beginning I mentioned you guys are one of my favorite because I love partners, owners and suppliers that are able to help customers solve multiple things in a more holistic view. And I think that takes us to one of the last conversations, which is obviously we talk a lot about financial savings and management. And that's important, obviously. But at the same time, that's not everything because Cloud oftentimes runs the business. It has to be more than just 1.2s reducing costs because it's also one of the areas that cost companies a lot of time. Right? And you're talking about configuration, you're talking about management, you're talking about support, you're talking about all of these things aside from cost for companies that they struggle with. So I love to have you kind of talk about the set up provisioning, the automation side of it. How do you guys do that to help, you know, whether it's It or finance, save time? Let's focus on the time, productivity, right side of it. How does that work? 1.1s

No. And that's huge. I'll go back to that example I was describing before, just to get some numbers around things. So, you know, we started working with an organization that I mentioned, that we were setting up that kind of it ASM workflow and kind of came into provision accounts. It was taking them like two weeks to get out, accounts set up and configured and provisioned. And it wasn't two weeks of work, right? It was different tickets that were traveling from one team to the next team, your security teams, the networking team to the provisioning team, et cetera. And 1.2s those tickets, while again, they maybe aren't a lot of heavy work, you can build some semi automated scripts and processes, they're just inefficient right, when they aren't fully connected, fully integrated and fully managed. And so the approach that Kayon takes, first off, is we model your organization so we understand how, frankly, how you do business. And that can be the way that you set up your cloud account taxonomy or subscription taxonomy 1.3s inside of say, AWS organizations or Azure management groups and things like that. Or it could be completely separate from that. And a lot of times we get into organizations that are maybe acquiring companies too, where they have completely different structures that now they're trying to bring together. So we first try to model the organization, then after that organization has kind of been modeled. We have this concept in our platform we call Cloud rules and think of these as just these kind of collections of automation that really help to make sure both the access to the cloud accounts as well as the infrastructure as code are all set up and configured in a very consistent way. So you may have things across your entire company that are just none negotiables. Maybe it's you're doing business. We have a lot of customers who do business with the US federal government. You can't host applications outside of US regions, inside of the cloud providers. So you may decide, OK, at the very top of your organization, you set that cloud rule to be able to provide that preventative control at the very top. And then as other different parts of your business, maybe you've got a healthcare side of the business, have different rules in place that they need to adhere to, that's applied only at their organization unit and below and all of that is inherited. And so the beauty of that is that when you get that new request to say, hey, I need to provision a new account, 1.2s Basically, wherever that account lives inside the organization will drive which one of those different sets of cloud rules that get applied to help ensure that the account is provisioned and set up properly. That also goes back to in our platform, we call them cloud access roles as well, which define the roles that people have to log in to those different accounts too. And so all of that happens by simply for us, we provision a new, let's just say it's AWS. We provision a new AWS account, attach it to a project, align that project to the organization unit, and from that point forward, all that automation happens automatically. So the user experience on that is once the request gets approved, they literally get a cloud account in a matter of minutes. With all that set up and the guesswork around, well, do I need to create a VPC that needs to be configured in a certain way? All goes out the window. So you don't really have a ton of extra things that the team that maybe isn't the expert cloud networking team or the IAM team, right? They don't have to worry about as much of those things. They can instead rely on Kayon to do all of that automation. Once those base rules are set up and the framework is set up, it becomes a huge time savings aspect across the organization. So that's something that we've built and are super proud of, just the approach that we've taken there. And we found, again, it saves organizations in a lot of cases, weeks of time on a recurring basis just to make sure that they deliver a true self service experience to their engineers in the cloud.

Yeah, I mean, able to save time and money on one of the biggest spend and most critical infrastructure of a business. You know, I mean, incredible, man. Again, you're so knowledgeable. This is such a great topic. We could talk for hours, like I told you earlier. So we'd love to extend this to a further webinar so people can learn more about Kayon. But obviously, I would say for this episode, any company that considering cloud or already have cloud but are interested in everything from cost savings, time savings, increased productivity, visibility, security, compliance for the cloud, absolutely should work with Eversource and Kyan. So, as we wrap up here, Brian, I have one last question for you, which we always like to end the podcast with, which is you've seen a lot throughout your career. If you have to give one advice, whether that's a personal advice or a business advice, 1.9s like that you're most passionate about, like what would be the one advice you would have for people. 1.2s

Yeah, I'll go with more of a business area of advice. Again, I think it just speaks to the company that I'm so proud that we've been able to build 1.1s it's. Always surround yourself with people smarter than you. Like we have so many talented, talented folks and in the early days so I started out my career handson, keyboard, software engineer early in my life, right. I'm nowhere shape or form as talented as the folks that we have here in this company that are doing some incredible things every day, building new capabilities in our platform. The same thing holds true with our delivery and support team, which is pre and post sales engineering. In the early days of the product, when we first started going out to market, it was myself, one of the other cofounders that were going out to different customers and in my head I always thought, how are we ever going to transition this to somebody else? Now? Again, four years later, we have a team of twelve people led by Randy Shore who runs that whole department, do that ten times better than I ever could. And just finding those people, not being afraid that hey, you want to bring in folks that are going to help move the company, move the business, move that area forward, is so critically important. So for other founders, for other folks that are starting their own business, don't be afraid to not be the smartest guy in the room. If you are, chances are you've done something wrong. Right. You need to have folks that really are doing things better and stronger and more scalable than what you maybe would have ever been able to do yourself. And finding those folks that complement your weaknesses are absolutely key to building a successful business.

Yes, again, that's an awesome advice because I know building a startup or building a business is like your baby, right? For those people that have kids, that's your baby and you feel like you can take care of the best. But I also say you don't want to have the doctor syndrome in a way where you are the business. Again, it's great, you're great at what you're doing, but you can't beat a whole business. Meaning if you don't do something and the whole company kind of shuts down, right? But definitely, man, I mean, you have an incredible team and we love partnering with you guys. So appreciate your time today and we'll talk soon.

Victor, thanks again for having me on and really excited to share a little of ours story today. So thanks again. 1.3s

That was an amazing episode of the did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode and if you want to get the best deals from the guests today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.

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