[00:00:00] John Kundtz: Hi, everybody. My name is John Kundtz, and welcome to another edition of the Cloud Collective Podcast.
Today, we are talking to a key executive with extensive FinOps experience, Anthony Desari, vice president of modern operations and public cloud service offerings.
Welcome to the show.
[00:00:26] Anthony Dasari: Thank you, John. How's it going today?
[00:00:31] John Kundtz: It's going great. We're recording this at the end of the day, right before the holidays. Things are starting to wind down, it's a great time of the year.
And so I'm looking forward to a few days off after we finish this recording. So how about you?
[00:00:48] Anthony Dasari: Oh, it is the best time of the year; everybody's jolly, merry trying to rebond with family and friends, right? And and and as we give presents. The people who manage the finances in the family are looking at their bills. It's a great time actually to have this conversation. from a FinOps perspective.
[00:01:18] John Kundtz: Pretty funny. Yeah, it's pretty apropos. We're going to be talking about FinOps. Before we get started, I let each of you share some background with our listeners. So, Anthony, why don't you get this started, please?
[00:01:33] Anthony Dasari: Yeah. Absolutely. John, I've been in this industry for almost 25-plus years, so I just dated myself. I'm excited about FinOps because in my 25-plus years of industry experience, I've been in product management for almost 14/15 years, and offering management and product management are similar, these years, market timing is always very difficult. You're either too early to the market or a little bit late, but for FinOps, we're in a Goldilocks moment.
Why?
Because the customer pain and priority really match very well with our capabilities, we highly encourage people listening to this podcast to go check out FinOps and finops.org and what this whole topic is about.
We'll talk a bit more about why now, but that's why I'm excited to talk about this topic and leverage this. Not only from a Kyndryl perspective on our capabilities but to really serve our customers with one of their top pains that has become a priority as they adapt to the cloud.
[00:03:12] John Kundtz: dive into that a little bit more. Let's peel that back a little bit. Why now? Why? You said it's a Goldilocks moment, and you're right. There's a lot of buzz around cost management and governance in the industry. FinOps and finops.org is growing. And we will talk more about how it's growing within our practices and the number of FinOps-certified practitioners we have.
But, if I was a customer or a client, why now? Why should I pay attention?
[00:03:43] Anthony Dasari: Absolutely.
The whole promise of the cloud was about providing not just innovation but also cost reduction and optimization, and really, a lot, allowing ROIs that align with innovation.
From that journey perspective, it was pretty straightforward if you look at the cost methodologies that were used when you had the traditional on-prem IT infrastructure. It's mature in terms of cost allocation. You bought capital, you allocated capital appropriately and all that stuff, and there's some transparency in the processes, and everybody knew how to account for it.
Now, when it comes to the cloud, it is all consumption-based. And there's a base assumption that when you deploy an application on the cloud, it is materialistic to exploit the architecture, cloud-native architectures of the cloud. If you look at the metering and the pricing that has been established in the cloud, they're based on consumption-based models aligned to the cloud-native architectures.
So when most of our customers adapted to the cloud, they just, most of them did a lift and shift. When they did a lift and shift, the metering happened, and the billing was fine-tuned for cloud-native architectures, but the workloads running on them was aligned to client-server acting.
So the. Cost drivers for the pricing were misaligned with the architecture of the applications that were running on it. So what happened is the bills that our customers have gotten as they adapted to the cloud without adopting a lot of the cloud native architecture, bills were out of their budget, the bills that they got.
That's number one. And then what happened is they started investigating.
- Where did I go wrong?
- Where did we go wrong?
They started investigating, and what they found out was that the billing data that they were getting was huge and humongous, for example, even a $100 bill on average is anywhere between 10 to 15 pages based on what services you're using, and most of our customers that we serve, are spending about a million dollars.
It's like hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of billing data that you're getting every month. And then, how do you ingest that, how do you then analyze that data, billing data, to allocate it to, from a cost perspective, and also from a showback perspective?
So that became a big challenge. And as they add up more clouds and move more apps, this has become a critical pain point they must solve. So that's why it's becoming a Goldilocks moment for the market and us.
[00:07:40] John Kundtz: I have a similar experience. We were working with a client about five years ago in the same situation as you described. Their cloud billing was inches thick every month, and it took a person anywhere from 45 to 60 days just to sort through the billing and determine A, if it was legitimate and then B, who the heck was supposed to be paying for it. And third, were they authorized to pay for it? It took them almost two months every month to figure out where the budget went, what PO they should be against, and how they should pay for it.
We got them to bring that process down to two weeks, which made everybody happy. It made the IT people happy. It made the finance people happy. It made the end users happy. And it made the service provider happy because they got paid faster. Because the client wouldn't pay their bills until they knew whether they were legitimate. And what cost center, for lack of a better word, that budget should come out of?
So that's why I concur. We're in a really good time right now. FinOps is hot. There's a lot of talk about it. If you go to finops.org, you'll see lots and lots of software providers, service providers, consultants, and all kinds.
To follow up on the why now, why Kyndryl?
[00:09:25] Anthony Dasari: Oh, great question.
From a Kyndryl perspective, we are a premier partner and a board member of finops.org. Let me give you a bit of context from a finops.org perspective. FinOps.org is part of the Linux Foundation open-source community. There are about 5,000 companies that are members, and there are only 21 certified service providers for FinOps.
We are one of those 21 elite service providers that have that certification. We have about 280 plus certified FinOps professionals who can immediately have a huge impact by giving transparency to our clients from their billing data perspective and showing them immediately how to save,
We have a campaign right now. It's called the 250 for 25K. What it means is we're going to identify $250,000 of savings for our clients for a $25K engagement, so they can immediately get insights and save that money,
Number three is a very unique value proposition that we bring. Our engineering team owns about 13 patents on FinOps. Tagging around optimization, from a cost optimization perspective, is based on AI ML models, and five more patents are pending.
So, combining this with the best practices and the framework that finops.org has established, we are uniquely differentiated in the market to provide value. Then, we will discuss the value for our clients from a FinOps perspective.
[00:11:49] John Kundtz: Excellent. I agree. Kyndryl goes to market very much in line with the Finops.org process of crawling, walking, and running. What you just described was something that would help our clients demonstrate the value, learn how it works, and things like that.
We'll come back to that at the show. I want to dive into that more, but I want to switch gears for one second with you.
First of all, congratulations are in order because I hear of all those 200-plus certified practitioners, and I hear you are one of them.
Thank you.
We talked about this in our prep, but I'm curious about the experience because it's one thing to go through and get certified. The other thing is, what did you take away? Could you share any pearls of wisdom going through that process with our listeners?
[00:12:47] Anthony Dasari: Absolutely. The finops.org certification was so valuable for me to understand how FinOps is set up. At the base level, we need to have a common vocabulary, so we didn't talk much about this, but if you have to have a FinOps within a client organization successfully. The secret to success is collaboration between a cross-functional squad that consists of procurement, engineering, developers, finance, and optics. Then, you bring this squad together to deliver the required business impact.
From a financial operations perspective, while managing your workloads across your hybrid cloud platform, you need a common vocabulary and a common framework, and a common set of best practices, really, the collaboration is happening across these cross-functional platforms because cross-functional teams because every team brings their own language based on their own education and their own silo.
So it is the minimum value add that finops.org certification provides is making sure all of them use the same vocabulary.
They understand the same framework. They understand how to do and establish this, so it's not just about the tooling. It concerns the processes, the people who must be cross-functional, and the very important culture.
The cultural aspects of FinOps are very important, and when you take the certification, it walks you through that framework on how to set up your teams, how to set up that discipline, and how to bring on sponsors. How to establish that collaboration. It is very insightful and gives you a list of challenges you may face while establishing this FinOps discipline and teams within the organization.
So it, it was it, was very valuable for me and the level of the framework just to give you guys a teaser, It consists of three phases of the FinOps framework, one is the most basic is that has immediate value is informed, you just ingest the data and inform where all the spend is from a cost perspective.
Then, you can optimize where you're spending by understanding all the different discounts and pricing. That's there, and how to optimize using the discounts that you have and the different pricing that each of the services has and then apply it to the workloads and the workload signature and then operate that using the FinOps teams and squads.
As you go across and then you don't have to do this in one bang, you can be in the crawl phase across all these phases. And then that would be one iteration. Then, you can be in the walk phase and go through all that iteration. Then, you can take one one-bite size to go through all these inform, optimize, and operate phases.
In the crawl, walk, run fashion. NetNet was a differentiator for me to be certified. It gives me the confidence to talk about it, help our customers recognize all the gaps, give transparency, and establish credibility.
[00:17:37] John Kundtz: It sounds like a tremendous experience and sounds like it's highly recommended to anybody who can have the opportunity to go through the process. And you also alluded to so much of this is not about the technology, that's probably the easiest part of this, you mentioned it's the culture. What would you recommend if somebody just wanted to get started with the first crawl initiative?
[00:18:00] Anthony Dasari: Yeah, the first thing is to just go to finops.org and start educating yourself. There are many courses that you can take. There's a lot of intellectual capital regarding articles that Kyndryl has shared with the community there.
And we just launched “FinOps in a Box.”
We are at the end of this podcast. We will share all the links for that initiative, and once you've done that, we will have enablement on all the Kyndryl capabilities that we have, from assessment services to door openers. I mentioned one in this podcast.
Which is 250K for 25K, identifying that savings of 250K. Then, we can move forward with a consulting engagement where we can establish the teams for our clients, the culture, the tooling, and the processes, and we can go about doing that.
But net-net starts with finops.org.
FinOps in a box that we have.
Then, propose the FinOps Assessment Services, and we'll see where we go from there.
[00:19:25] John Kundtz: We will put all those links into the show notes as long as well as your LinkedIn connection. LinkedIn is a good place to start a conversation.
I want to wrap it up and say thank you for a great interview. You answered my last question, which is where we go. We'll point people to the finops.org, the FinOps in the Box, and a few other things we mentioned. So that's really all I had.
I wanted to thank you for joining us, and have a great day. Thanks, Anthony.
[00:20:01] Anthony Dasari: Thank you, John. You too.