Businesses are continuing to digitally transform, and the integral technology is cloud. Whether it’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud investments now dominate IT budgets. Trusted advisors have an incredible opportunity to help their clients ensure their cloud assets and expenses stay within the budget and remain optimized for their business.
A Cloud Expense Management (CEM) solution is the fastest and easiest way to identify and maintain the right balance between cloud innovation and financial excellence. By pairing Tangoe One Cloud with UCaaS, SaaS, or IaaS sales, partners can help ensure clients get the most out of their investments in digital innovation. In this article, we’ll take a look at key strategies helping partners both provide meaningful value for their clients and how to leverage Tangoe One Cloud to drive sales and revenue growth for your business.
Strategy 1: Help clients tackle SaaS security and spend
Shadow IT brings significant security risk which drives IT leaders to investigate solutions that unveil unsanctioned applications, but taking a narrow approach to SaaS security often means overlooking a closely related issue – the cost of Shadow IT. As a strategic advisor for IT executives, partners should help companies widen their strategy addressing SaaS security and SaaS spending together.
With the average company facing about one SaaS renewal every day, SaaS spend management is the largest partner opportunity today. Roughly 97% of companies use SaaS, but only 62% have any defined governance for cloud, according to research firm Nemertes. Tangoe typically saves clients 15-40% on their cloud technologies — a much higher savings when compared to telecom and mobile technologies.
Many CIOs and CFOs find their attention is focused on IaaS bill shock and the challenges of curbing variable cloud infrastructure costs. However SaaS can be equally damaging to the IT budget, and SaaS spending realities remain in the shadows until a partner helps illuminate them. Within 24-48 hours, Tangoe can expose overspending related to redundant applications and pinpoint any app licenses going wasted. One CIO.com cloud study shows on average companies waste 29% of SaaS licenses with 12% of them unused and 17% underutilized.
The bottom line: SaaS is where partners can add the greatest impact and value for their clients.
SaaS Spend Management: Door-opening questions to ask clients
- Do you have centralized visibility into SaaS applications and Shadow IT?
- Do you know how many of your app licenses go unused or wasted?
- Do you have a way of knowing who uses applications like Microsoft 365, how they use them, and which users are considered “power users?”
- Do you know how much you’re spending on SaaS applications and how to reduce app and vendor redundancy to better leverage economies of scale?
- Do you have an automated system to manage app license assignments and reallocations as employees enter and exit the company?
Strategy 2: Protect your client’s cloud budget and prevent IaaS costs from going sky-high
More and more applications and workloads are moving to the cloud, and with the agility of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, IBM, etc., it’s easy to see why. But all too soon, cloud-first companies find themselves pushing — and even breaking — the limits of their cloud budget. Variable cloud costs rise almost inevitably when companies don’t have an IT financial analyst keeping a close eye on the spending. This issue has given rise to a new cloud cost management strategy called FinOps.
While the FinOps framework puts a proven cost governance structure into place for IT and finance leaders, technologies and services are required to turn this framework into an ongoing practice. This need is an important opportunity for partners, and for their clients already using cloud infrastructure services or purchasing new ones. Pair IaaS solutions with the Tangoe One Cloud for IaaS solution when clients want to oversee cloud spending, monitor cloud service usage, and put checks and balances around their cloud budget or cloud financial management practices.
IaaS spend management: Door-opening questions to ask clients
- Are your AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) costs rising or creating cost overruns? Do you need tools and services to help you see how you’re using IaaS services and know how to get more value out of the services you purchase?
- Many companies struggle with cost allocations for cloud services. Are you having trouble managing and evaluating IaaS invoices — which typically have hundreds or even thousands of line items and charge fees?
- Do you need help rightsizing your IaaS resources, including getting help with tagging, long-term discounts (Savings plans), and service pausing features that can help conserve your resources?
Value Proposition: Tangoe stands above cloud cost optimization solutions with these differentiators
- Cost optimization for IaaS, SaaS and UCaaS are all in one platform, the Tangoe One Cloud platform.
- Tangoe has the widest cloud visibility in the industry, thanks to our large ecosystem of IaaS and SaaS integrations. Tangoe’s AI-powered optimization engine ingests cloud data from a vast number of IaaS providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud. It also connects to SaaS applications via 550+ direct integrations and works with 200,000 other applications. Plus, our Smart App Discovery process provides five different ways to uncover unknown applications running inside a corporate network environment.
- As the smartest AI-powered FinOps solution, Tangoe One Cloud includes 13 patented AI automation tools that accelerate cloud insights, expense management processes, and time to savings.
- Tangoe offers capabilities that go beyond just cloud visibility and cost savings recommendations. The Tangoe One Cloud helps companies also financially manage their cloud estate with flexible invoice management, cost allocation tools, as well as the ability to integrate with corporate financial systems, so clients can compare actual cloud costs against their budgeted spending. By flagging any variations and cost overruns with alerts, clients enable a FinOps strategy with ongoing cost policy and cloud governance.
Real Results: See how a research firm turned 40-hour cloud cost reports into 5-minute reports with help from Tangoe.
As businesses continue to adopt cloud-based services, it’s critical for partners to complement these investments with effective Cloud Expense Management solutions. Tangoe One Cloud offers an array of benefits ranging from higher efficiencies in cloud resource usage to simplified cloud financial management. By leveraging Tangoe’s portfolio of cloud services and tools, partners can drive client engagement and cloud ROI, while also stimulating their overall revenue growth.