[Music] all right good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone my name is victor predes colonia and i'm part of our itam outbound business unit and i'm excited to have another one of these servicenow events this time focused around cloud cost management and optimization so join me today as we talk about cloud cost management and before we get started just a few little announcements first and foremost information here may be privileged and confidential so please bear that in mind in addition we may answer some questions or demonstrate some information that is forward-looking so just bear that in mind that some things are subject to change but without further ado again thank you for joining us and good morning good evening and good afternoon this is one of our other servicenow events where we're helping all our customers deploy adopt and achieve value faster with their investments in servicenow more specifically speaking we're going to talk about cloud insights and really understand how to set up success for cloud insights and to do that i've also brought another one of our product managers to help us do that my name is victor and also joining me is patrick lowndes both of us are part of the itam outbound product management team and joining us today is rohan tiagi rohan thank you for joining us we understand that you're part of the servicenow software asset management team and you focus specifically on cloud insights so we're very excited to have you today yeah good morning victor and excited to be on the session thanks for inviting of course and so for all of you out there uh today we're going to talk about four four areas you know the first and foremost i'm gonna i'm gonna have a conversation with rohan about why cloud insights is a strategic imperative for modern its management then we'll dive a little bit deeper into roles and responsibilities and stakeholder management for your cloud cloud management program and then what is it like to set up goals for cloud insights and and and gain optimization through that product feature and finally we'll have him dive into a demonstration showing us how to ingest billing data set policy settings and then ultimately demonstrate a cloud workflow like everything please include any questions or comments in the chat we'll address those along the way and as always please stay laser focused on the topics of the day share any insights you might have and contribute what you know this is an interactive forum and we're going to get to open up the mics and get your questions as we proceed so let's get started uh rohan i'm going to ask the first question maybe at a very high level just to bring everything in macro focus and then we'll dive back into details but why is cloud insights a strategic imperative what do we mean by modern it asset management and where does cloud insights fit in that spectrum yeah that's a very good question and victor i would like to start from the um statement that we with the cloud journey customers have already adopted the cloud or they are very actively on their digital transformation journey so there is no question whether they will adopt the cloud or not it is all about expanding the cloud adoption and a lot of times when we are expanding the cloud adoption the the spend on the cloud increases over time and what starts happening is the same problems that we used to have with the traditional id asset management will start coming up in the cloud environments as well for example the decentralization of this technology the the whole purpose of this being more agile cloud being more easy to adopt um brought so many advantages to the companies they became more agile they became they started releasing their products much more faster all of that is good however that decentralization also started bringing up more problems around how do we manage this band how do we manage those assets in the cloud from a security perspective from a governance perspective so there was always a need of being able to control everything from one place be able to have insights from a central perspective but then it was not the right time it was not the right time to be able to control all of these but now now that customers have already adopted the cloud they understand the economics of the cloud it is becoming much more relevant in the market and that's why it is such a strategic imperative with its management because these were the same principles that people have learned or customers have learned over time the goals are the same if you talk about on-prem infrastructure or on-prem data center the goals are the same if there is an asset somewhere out there in my environment and it has a financial um it has a financial aspect to it i should be managing it as an asset if it has a security risk i should be managing it or at least i should have visibility into it even if i'm not directly managing it if even if it is a decentralized infrastructure i'm fine with that that would be my company policy because it is helping the company grow but at some point somebody should have a overall picture of the entire infrastructure and that's what i mean by saying that it is a strategic imperative because you um can leverage all the benefits that a decentralized structure or a cloud environment can bring to your company but at the same time have those policies and have those lessons that you have learned through iot asset management uh be applied to the cloud environments as well nice so you talked a little bit about some of the main objectives in cloud insights and having similarities with that of of software asset management or hardware asset management really the visibility of tracking assets can we can we jump a little bit deeper and specifically call out use cases or actual goals that that some folks have with cloud insights i think you touched on those i'd like to jump in a little deeper on those yeah um so one of the goals that every company usually starts with and we can call it as the um if you want to divide it into uh crawl walk run phases the crawl phase is where companies would just try to understand as a central organization how much are we spending and which in the cloud and which teams are responsible for that spending so you should be able to correlate the cloud costs to your business centers in fact some more mature companies correlate these cloud costs to the use cases or the business uses or the application benefits that they are achieving for example sometimes uh customers start or people start to think that increase in the cloud spend is is probably not the right thing they are losing control on the cloud spend or whatever the reason could be so it has a negative connotation to it whereas if you think carefully about it if this increase in cloud spend is helping you grow your business if you are able to correlate the unit economics that um the the amount of money that you're spending in the cloud is also increasing the revenue that you're generating that's not a bad um that that's not bad right that so it's just all about the basic correlation of how much you're spending in the cloud and what value it is bringing to your company so that should be the very first goal around it and then you can then build up on this goal and you can start having other goals like if i have a pretty large cloud environment am i making the best use of that environment can i find opportunities to start saving um or stop wasting the cloud resources in fact it's pretty interesting uh we just keep on focusing on the on the money that we're wasting or the spend that we are letting uh go away uh in these cloud environments but then there are uh new use cases that are coming up for example the esg the environmental impact cloud resources every major cloud service provider be it azure google or aws all of them are now focusing on how much this how what is the impact on the environment of their cloud resources so it's not just about um about increasing the spending cloud and how can we control the waste it is all about it is also about other initiatives that are becoming more relevant in this environment um so so so i think coming back to your question about the particular goals i would say the very beginning the very start is to be able to correlate um i am not using the word allocate i'm still saying that even if you're not mature enough to start allocating at least you as a central team should have information to be able to correlate what you're spending whether the spend is bringing value to you or not and if it is not bringing value how can we start cutting those expenditures got it got it so so having visibility correlating understanding your cloud inside infrastructure environment and then from there advancing to hey how am i spending where where am i where can i cut waste and then even to something like esg like you were saying expanding into even more more use cases so there's definitely a lot of development evolution that someone can take in a cloud insights journey right and i i would i would still um i forgot to bring out one more point here is that a lot of organizations um as i was talking about crawl walk run phases a lot of organizations have become mature enough to get control onto um the the allocation perspective part of it or correlation part of it that this is the cloud spend that i'm spending on these business units and they also uh get the optimization recommendations that okay if these resources are not being used i can potentially save this much amount of money or i can potentially shut down these number of machines so that my environmental impact is low however just getting the information and turning it into action is a whole different game and turning it into action is where i want to stress really heavily because till the time i mean if you are just looking at the potential savings and you're not able to take any actions you're not able to report it back to your executives those who are looking for for goals and kpis that okay it's good to see that i can save two hundred thousand dollars but have you saved even even a penny right and that's where the operate state uh comes into play the the third one on the slide deck um where you can create more and more automation so that the the recommendations that you're getting to save money can be executed automatically or even if they're not getting automated at least the people who are working on those recommendations to to take the action have all the relevant information they can take those actions faster and achieve those savings yeah yeah that's a good point that there are individuals that need to understand what is the progress being made with the investment in cloud insights right so you're doing all this activity you're saving all this money or or you have the ability to save all this money but are you actually either a taking action and b reporting the the savings and success along the way so so that's a good that's a good segue into our next segment actually in terms of understanding who are the folks that are responsible for carrying out uh this type of uh activity and who are the folks that you should be reporting back to so who are the stakeholders what are their roles and responsibilities um so with that said why don't i ask a question like like this who are the folks that we should have in a in a cloud infrastructure environment that we should be working with and and you know having authori you know having some sort of activities and explaining back what we're saving on first from that right um so i think the the very foremost the most important persona that you should be um you should be focused on or you should be asking for uh support is the executives there should be a drive from the executive executives that um either that goal could be having as i said before having a central visibility into how much you're spending in the company so that you have the leverage to negotiate the prices with your cloud service providers right if you do not know if you just think that you're spending fifty thousand dollars in as a company for azure you cannot go back to them and ask for discounting uh discount on the skus and all right but if you start looking at your environment deeply and you find out that there's 50 000 dollar pockets like they're tens of pockets or fifty thousand dollars it becomes a totally different story and you can then just go back to azure and you can go back to aws and ask for the negotiations and discounts on those prices so i think there should be first of all um a good sponsorship from the executives that is applicable to all the programs whether we're talking about phinops whether we are talking about traditional ideas and management and all those things um so keep that in mind that that's definitely executives and the second thing that we are seeing here is um the persona of cloud operations or phenoms uh phenox might be a new term um however the the origination is the the itn finance um or the procurement teams which started getting their bills more frequently on a monthly basis from cloud service providers and they wanted to understand that that that are we paying um the the payments that we're making to these cloud service providers are they going in the right direction do we even know uh which teams are using them can we start asking them for um accountability and all those things so this push started coming from the i.t finance teams because they were approving those uh those bills and those purchase orders and so that's where these it finance teams started working with the cloud operations teams to understand um hey guys these are um these are the builds i want to correlate them with the resources that you have in the cloud and that's where these two people started talking to each other that um that phenoms organizations or pinops frameworks started coming up and so i would say that a number of companies have now adopted these phenoms frameworks so this persona has also become really important so the phenom person will be the mediator between your finance teams and the cloud operations teams and they will be the people who create frameworks who will create policies how the whole function of cloud cost management should work there are a lot of teams where the i.t asset management teams have have have come up to become phenom schemes as well but in some other cases these phenoms teams are separate from it asset management teams and the reason um and there is a reason why these two teams should be talking to each other because there is so much common knowledge if shared between these two personas you can bring a lot more value to your organization so do not ignore the ideas and management teams if you have a fin ops teams or if you have evolved the finnops teams from your ideas management team then you're good to go however um just to summarize everything back executive sponsorship is most important and after that phenoms or id asset management and finance things are really important pieces of this to the persona puzzle and then there are some other stakeholders or other teams that you should also be keeping in touch is the cmdb rit discovery team risk management team security teams these teams can also benefit from the information that you have um in the ids management organization yeah thank you rohan so so i want to go back to the executive sponsor piece if i'm a new customer or if i'm looking to expand in the cloud insights area what are the types of conversations i should be having right how do i secure executive sponsorship commitment and then along the way how do i maintain it because a lot of times you know we get a lot of executive sponsorship for a lot of our programs or projects but it just kind of fizzles away and and you know they either lose interest or they change directions in terms of what is important to them how do we how do we maintain that conversation with them um yeah so one of the ways that could be very effective is um to create the sense of accountability across the organization so if the uh conversations that you're having with executives is around um um is around let's let's let's bring the whole spanned management of the cloud environments into one place and hold the teams accountable for that spend and not let them drive this uh i mean they can those individual application teams can drive the innovation they can drive um the pace at which they innovate and they release their products however when it comes to having a better control on how much they can spend and and what is the best way to spend in the cloud let's bring that control back and then we can hold them still they use those resources so i think the executives will understand this term or these type of conversations better that we are not taking control from our application teams all we are asking for or all we should be driving as a company is to have um have some sort of accountability um they should be answerable to questions like why are we spending uh probably a little bit more um on certain projects which were de-prioritized from an executive perspective right so those type of things ring the bell in these in the minds of these executives where they try to because they they have the more strategic feed they have the um high level view and they say that okay these let's say applications order processing application uh reservations tons of applications that they have in the environment and they know which one needs focus which one does not need much focus and they want to uh allocate the spend they want to allocate the budget accordingly so if you bring those type of conversations towards them and they understand that they can start having control this way and they can hold those teams accountable that's what becomes a more effective conversation they become more interested in that that's one way um of of approaching these executives there are so many others but i just give you one example okay okay great and i appreciate that rohan thank you for sharing that i think i think with any program sam ham cloud insights executive sponsorship is key right and then as you called out there are other commonly involved stakeholders that you might even see in other areas of its management but then similarly there's other stakeholders that either they're not always involved but either benefit from information that you can share with them with respect to in this case cloud insights right so security vulnerability vendor management and risk management i'm going to pause here and see if there's any questions in the q a form yeah yeah let's go ahead and move forward and when we think about again just the importance of managing costs in the cloud i i'd like to just drill into this a little bit further with you rohan um one of the as we're we're waiting for the the first couple questions i see one of them just came in but why don't you give us just a quick answer um which which clouds uh does cloud insights cover let's just kind of touch on that just to make sure people will know yeah um intestine cloud insights application supports the three major cloud providers aws azure and google um so these are already ga we are already supporting these three cloud service providers um some others are on our roadmap but these three were the top ones and one thing to keep in mind is that the the major benefit that you get from softwares like cloud insights is being able to manage hybrid cloud environments and in case of in case of um cloud insights on servicenow platform you are in fact getting a better opportunity to manage hybrid infrastructure not just hybrid cloud but hybrid infrastructure on-prem and cloud all together um so and the reason of the importance of hybrid cloud environment is of course that the the when you start allocating the cost so imagine that your team one has is using all three cloud service providers right depending on the services that they acquired maybe azure is better for something google is better for containers blah blah blah so they have spent in all three cloud environments now when you are as a centrality team trying to allocate or correlate the spend for this particular team it is really hard to go into each one of those portals figure out how much the spending filter down the data export it do excel math and then send it back to them right so that takes so much effort what hybrid cloud environment expand management will bring is just one um single pane of glass not a single pane of class but also the way you talk about cloud span the methodologies you create um all of that is the same so it's all tied in no i like that and that's why it's important um i mean if you have most companies they might have a primary cloud that they try to focus on we're hearing that but there's also going to be you know those other clouds and use cases where it makes sense to have those um stood up as well um let's go to a question from alicia she says she says hello how does cloud insights work within the context of the common service data model or csdm for those who maybe use that acronym so maybe you could give a little bit of color on that yeah and that's a very a good question um i would say um if i was given a chance i would have spoken about the cmdb and cstm importance to our product is that everything that we download from the cloud portals all the metadata all the infrastructure information it starts federating the same central um cmdb and the benefit from mana for from federating that cmdb is that there is a lot of times when the information is not just available from the apis or from the cloud information that we gather from the cloud service portals directly but that there is a lot of a lot more information that is already available in the cmdb coming from different sources like discovery application mapping security and all those things so when we when we consolidate all this information tie it to one ci it becomes even more um influential or even more um um important to you to your organization that you can start reporting on things where you're missing the data from the cloud service project for example if you're missing a tag on a cloud resource you will not be able to allocate the spend to that particular business unit right but if you have apm and that apm is telling you that the ci belongs to application xyz you can then report um on the spend for that application even if you're missing the tax so that is where csdn or cmdb all those logics come into play and become more important that's great yeah and and it's important again just to know that um when you're dealing just with the native cloud provider net solution that obviously it's it's not going to be talking apples to apples so the data model will be different which means it's a lot more leg work for you to figure out how to make sense of it within servicenow and your larger you know ecosystem not to mention you know cloud cost projections and things that you can do and more advanced features that we have moving from on-prem workloads all the way up to in the cloud let's go to this next question and then we'll probably keep keep the ball moving here but i see a raised hand so raynor i'm going to go ahead and allow you to talk here i just hit the button so go ahead share your question for us just come off mute i think you're still there and rohan will answer your question but go ahead and come off mute um rainer we're up you're up next here and let's see and if we don't get you this oh there you go go ahead yeah i think you just had it try it again oh i see you coming off perhaps just type it in the chat excuse me the q a and we will get to it here as as that comes in so that's all right um okay so we will and again we're going to have another question and answer time here in just a little bit so while you're taking time to type that in let's hit on this last part victor so i'll send this over to you and um we'll continue answering questions here near the end so no worries here about um um rainer or others that want to ask questions so all right victor back to you thanks patrick yeah so rohan i want to talk now about goal setting um so i'm going to get started as a as a customer in my in my cloud infrastructure in my cloud insights um project if you will and i wonder i want to do everything right so if i want to do everything is there a better way of just saying hey i'm going to go reach for the stars and just you know track all my cloud spends is there a more methodical way about going about setting up your goals for clouded sites yeah there is and there must be um it is um it is it is um i mean it is very important to have goals but also it is very common that people forget about uh setting the goals before venturing into a particular space and that even happens with the cloud cost optimization class called cloud cost management um space so there will be certain situations where someone will go into a conference or learn about phenoms or sessions like these um and come back with the with the message that there is so much waste in the cloud and i want to just save it and so unrealistic goals or some things that are um not very specific uh creates a lot of problem for example um let's say i went into a conference by gartner or forrester and i came back with the um with the message that 30 of the spend can be saved right and i create this as a goal i want to cut my cloud spend by 30 because that's what analysts have told me in the conference right this is not a realistic goal i mean not literally it is realistic but you have to have a phased approach towards it right so what could be a phased approach what could be more realistic way of approaching this and is this the is this the very first step you would like to take probably not so what you need to do as a company is create your own roadmap and a lot of times people create roadmaps and they um then try to um correlate the things with the product roadmap as well like the tools that they're using i'm not just talking about service now but any tool that you may have even an excel sheet um so you should also be careful about what is the products roadmap along with with your own roadmap so things that are achievable with your goals and with the goals of the product is going to bring you the most success so um maybe the first step um should be that i want to manage the cloud spend in a specific way right so if you want to so so that is the first spend the first step that you want to manage the public cloud span second step could be that you want to save on that public cloud span and the third step could be that you want to create budgets for those application teams in your company but how do you approach all these three phases right so the very first goal instead of having it to be more broad make it narrow say i want to start allocating monthly cloud costs to begin with just two business units and see learn from them if they are okay with the information that i'm sharing with them do they have any feedback once i have good control on those two business units or cost centers then i will start expanding it to the rest of the company so maybe the first three months would be just learning from two company two two business units and expanding into the rest of the team in three months you got this much you started doing allocations executives will be happy because they see the impact that you promised right uh now you move on to the second step of start saving the money also look at what your products can help you do it whether one product can do it or three products will be required to do it right and how do you how do you strategize around that um so now maybe the next focus is not cutting the spend by 30 but the next focus could be start savings by right sizing over provisioned only compute resources not all the resources just the computer resources that you're focusing on right and then continue it for three more months then once you have a good control on that you can pick up the next resource like databases or whatever you have in the environment maybe you do not want to do that just stay on compute and also execute on the third step and then do the cycle again all along so that is the way that is the phase approach that i try to um suggest my customers in my conversations with customers yeah i hope it resonates i think that was really well said rohan i i was kind of captivated by the way that you structured that because i think i think the way that you have to think about this is you need to be intentional right you need to just not cast a wide net and think that hey i'm going to get get whatever i can and that's going to be successful i think you need to start very small very prescriptive and even if you're getting noise from the background that says hey why are you starting so small i think it serves two purposes one is to demonstrate that you can do it and two is to to demonstrate that if we did this in a larger scope we would get very similar if not better results right so i think that's a really great way of thinking about how to set any type of goal when it comes to its management and rohan if i could jump into it it feels like uh i don't ask my five-year-old that just who just learned how to ride a bike i'm not asking her to go off you know large jumps and do tricks at the age of five right she's learning how to round the corner and have you know still have some speed and go up and down hills like we're not hitting bike jumps yet and so in the same way we want to be we want to we want to get good at the basics and understand you know the mechanics of phenoms right and and then we get into those those um those larger yeah i would say more highly mature uh use cases where you're going to see a lot large uh larger optimization so that's that's a great i'm just pulling that example out of my personal life here but hopefully it's relevant as well yeah that's good i like that okay cool so so rohan um you set the stage for how to set goals what i'd like to do now is maybe jump into uh the product and and let's demonstrate a little bit how to to go about from the goal setting aspect into getting some results so maybe you can walk us through how cloud insights works from a very high level uh and then from there let's let's jump into the to the product yeah sure so i'm sharing my screen now um this is the cloud insights application within the servicenow platform um and on the landing page by the way i'm not doing a complete demo of the application so i'm just going to hit on a couple of use cases which could be very relevant and maybe that's that's the way you can start your goal setting right so i'll just quickly go through the landing page and after that i'll go into the use case so on the landing page we are giving you information about um your hybrid cloud cost management um all the three cloud service providers that we support here are right here if you just want to focus on one of them you can select one of those otherwise you are getting a consolidated view into your hybrid cloud environment you can see how much you're spending on a day on a monthly basis on in the last 30 days this is how much you spent and as compared to this last 30-day spend in future how much you can save if you perform any of these optimization actions like right sizing or changing the infrastructure configuration business hours or schedule the resources to be on or off during certain times unused machines removing the machines which are never being used or making use of your reservation plans um so you can click on any of these and go into further details what i will do for today's session is pick up on the scheduling um processes again i'm going back to the same con same topic i was um i focused on in the in the very beginning of this session that taking the actions making it easier to take those actions is going to be the really uh is going to be the game changer um if you just see how much you can save and you cannot do much about it um there's no point right so let's keep that mindset here right so i'm going into the business hours um case here um again you can summarize with the ui later on but um i will straight away go into the actions so what i'm i can do here in in this product is that i can create policies i can tell the system when the machines should be up and running and when the machines should be shut down so that i don't waste spend during non-business hours during the hours when those machines are not really required now there are a lot of times questions being asked that this is a cloud environment we mostly have all the machines running all the time right which is not true uh it is just a perception machines are not required to be running all the time there are certain teams um or almost every application team has a dev environment every application team has a uat environment those environments can be shut down maybe production can never be shut down but dev environments can be shut down right so you can definitely save on those type of resources so what i will do here is just um create a policy to um for my aws environment um and save schedule for weekdays right and this will my intention is that i will schedule my aws resources to be only running during weekdays and a certain period of time right so here um i will give an order run order is important because if the same resources are shared amongst policies then based on the execution order they will be prioritized right um again something that you will understand once you get more familiar with the product but for now just imagine that i have given order in which these policies should be executed one after the other so in this case i'm only creating this policy for aws so i will select that provider in the service accounts i have multiple service accounts at aws one of the service accounts that i'm um responsible for as a com as a teammate is the rewards processing application so i will filter down only those resources which fall in my service account so if i'm the admin i can create policies for all the service accounts but let's say for now i'm focusing on just the rewards processing which is the environment that i'm responsible for or application i'm responsible for right and even within rewards processing i only want to focus on resources which belong to dev environments right so i can filter the resources by saying that all the resources which have a tadpole environment um and the value is dev i want to create this policy and once i'm done setting up the properties of that policy i can then select here what is the type of the policy it is so there can be three types of policies one is the report only where i just want to see the data how much i'm spending in business hours versus how much i'm spending in non-business hours once i have confidence looking at the data that i can shut down the machines during non-business hours i will then convert them into either a manual change approval process or an automated change process this is where the action or operate states comes into picture becomes much more important is that you are telling the system that you have to go through a change approval process so the approval workflow people who should be approving these type of changes uh people who should be asking you questions all of that is just routed through a change record now you are not exchanging emails with those people you're simply allowing them to collaborate with you in the platform right so i'll first of all um as a first step i would just go with the report only the safest option i just want to monitor how much i'm spending in the cloud during business hours versus one business hour so i'll select report only and i can select what is my schedule what time should this machine be up and running and that is my 8 am to 10 pm on weekdays eastern standard time there are many other business hours schedules all the schedules in the servicenow system can be created and once they once a business schedule is created you can make it based on fiscal year you can make it based on different types of things business hours or scheduling is pretty robust in the servicenow platform so once you have defined that um schedule it will show up here in this drop down and you can select that once it is saved it will start calculating your spend the information that it has downloaded so far it will start calculating based on that uh how much you um have spent during business hours versus non-business hours i'll give you an example so let's say um now i have created a report to see how much i'm spending in a business hour versus non-business hour so you will get data something like data like this um so in this case i have already selected a particular policy which i'm interested in the one that i created um uh orders it so the one i created just during this demo was rewards processing it will take some time so i'm opening up existing one so this one is the one that i created early in the morning uh it was called order status production and in this case you can see you can see how much you're spending during non-business hours which is the the salmon color and the other one is the business hours which is the blue color and evaluate uh how your spend is trending across these two these two categories of hours in this case what i'm seeing here is that my spend during non-business hours is also pretty high which could mean two things one is that my machines are required to be used during those non-business hours so maybe i need to tweak my schedule and say that these machines should be running during a certain hour other than what i have selected so now the benefit here is that the policy that you created as a report only before you really take actions before you convert into action you can understand what is the perfect business schedule for you once you have decided that this is the schedule when these machines should be running you can then go back to it modify your um let's pick up one of these um modify the policy and say in the modification now i do not want the 8 to 10 weekdays est because that was the graphs were showing me that i'm spending money or i'm using those resources during other hours as well so i will modify this i will change a different i will switch to a different business hour schedule right and once i change to that then i want to perform the automation behind the scenes i will say that power on the machine is during this time using this flow and these flows are already defined in the servicenow platform um you can modify them but they are already available out of the box so power on flow will tell you what which actions should be taken to start the machine and a stop uh flow will tell you which action will be taken to stop the machine so what will happen in the end is um using these policies now that it has become a let me go back now that it has become now now that it has become a auto approval policy um this is going to take these actions will take um will will happen automatically and and we will start saving money um in the in the product and you can visualize that on the dashboards too so that's um one example um of leveraging the automation creating rules in the system so that you can start saving money as soon as you implement the product that's great i think one of the things that i took away with your demonstration there is the actions can be as simple as just visibility report information to me all the way to let me do some manual activities based on the date i'm getting all the way through to hey now that i know now that i have studied this fairly well and i know what's happening i can automate action in the background so i don't have to worry about that anymore because i vetted that policy i understand it and it's going to work on its own i can focus on other policies or other activities right so that's kind of the workflow if you will how you should manage that exactly and this is going back to the same things that we discussed around goal setting that when you set the goals you should be um it is hard to win confidence right so the people who are asking or who are suggesting that we can save money by changing the infrastructure the engineering teams will not accept that um except that that statement blindly right they need you need to build confidence with them so once you take these these type of phrased approaches that let me analyze the data first let me do something called reporting only and then share that information with you then we tweak we work with each other we tweak things then we make it a manual process where you approve it once you are satisfied then once i'm i'm i've learned from your manual approval process that you always approve these type of recommendations you have confidence in these type of recommendations then i can automate that process rather than going all the way up on automation doing something wrong losing the confidence losing the executive sponsorship and the program program phase yeah yeah no that's that's very clear and that makes a lot of sense so you're bringing in data um you're you're looking at the information and then you're taking action i think that's very clear very good i'm going to see if there's any questions because we're getting close to the end here i think i saw somebody post something in the chat is that what i saw oh yeah yeah someone was uh somebody was asking about the the copy of the slides and and the recording we're gonna put both the slides in the recording uh on the the itam community so you'll be able to get access to this after after we we wrap up um which is going to be helpful um and let's let's see if there's any other questions and and think particularly about goal setting around cloud and also just some of the workflows that uh that rohan walked through or if you have any other questions about um you know the topics we talked about today let's go ahead and just put those questions in the q a and while while we're watching those come in rohan i'll i'll ask you this question tell us about um again companies you did a great job talking about the phases of just get the data in there focus on that um can you maybe tie in how this relates if you're on this call and you're listening as as more of a the software asset uh you know team that maybe you're not as close to to these to these cloud ins yeah you know operators and the cloud center of excellence what advice would you give to those folks that are coming from the software asset world um for them to to kind of start a conversation with and also to know how can their discipline be relevant um you know to these these cloud operators so what advice would you give to those sam folks that might be listening in yeah that's a good question patrick and it has come up recently uh in my conversations with customers uh more often than than before uh there is so so we are talking about two bubbles right now we're talking about a software asset management team that um typically works with the on-prem on-prem infrastructure they they work on the licensing cost they'll work on the license optimization costs right and then there is a finos cloud team which do not have to deal with licenses or license complications because cloud is so easy simple you just pay with your credit card online and so what ends up happening is that in the end as i said before they both are assets whether they are on your prem uh on on your own premises or they're on the cloud their assets and they have financial implications associated with it so the same finance teams who were asking different questions to look sam team are asking a different set of questions to the cloud team however when you uh try to fill the gaps for both these teams by working together it becomes much more synergy in the company for example there could be cloud resources um which have metadata that is uh that is not available to the sam teams um sam teams have enterprise agreement licenses they know that they have some surplus of licenses however they cannot uh they do they do not know um whether they should give it um and what should that is also wasted spent for them right but if they knew that there is also a cloud team who is spinning up sql servers or windows servers in the cloud and they are buying licenses on the fly i wish i could have shared my licenses which are just sitting there surplus i would have shared with them if i was talking uh if these two games were talking to each other right so that is the power that is the type of information when you share information you can use so microsoft azure to be very precise in my argument microsoft azure allows you azure hybrid benefits they also allow you license mobility type of concepts right these things are not clear to the cloud teams um or even if they're clear they're not easy to really make sense because they do not have visibility into the software um assets right and likewise software as a team does not know where they can apply those licenses in the cloud so bring your own license is one concept that a lot of teams when they work independently cloud phenoms and the sam teams um they do not leverage that that benefit yeah wow that's okay they can use it those are another example yeah we'll go ahead one more example and then yeah i mean this is great yeah one more example i can give you is that a lot of teams when they are going through the digital transformation journey even if they have achieved the digital transformation they have moved almost everything to the cloud but there are certain things that are still on-prem that deciding uh which ones to go to the move to the cloud or maybe there are certain resources which are coming end of life on-prem now they need to make a decision whether they renew their licenses or they should move to the cloud those type of conversation conversations can also be eased if they are talking to each other if the sam team knows how it is to live in the cloud they can take better decisions right so to simulate situations like my license is coming end of life should i move to cloud or not um those type of conversation can also be helped if if you who are talking to each other and that also that might even involve going back to stakeholders that that might involve like a data center team that's intimately aware of that infrastructure environment and they they might already have that cadence where they're looking at software that might be expiring um or potentially even hardware work you know that needs to be upgraded and there might be some questions there so if the itam group is in is going to cloud cost center of excellence that ccoe the finnops team i think there's a really productive conversation there about um the the the its spend in general from the cio level um and and how much of that should stay on premise versus how much of that should transition and and there's some features um coming out as well in the not too distant future around that about uh you know assessing the cost of you know like simulating that cost between on-premise environments and what what that could look like in different clouds so that's that's great yeah okay that's awesome i think if we haven't had yeah if we have a couple of more minutes patrick i would like to bring up one slide that we did not flash here um victor slide number 17 if you can bring that up please sure that will just um give better context to the listeners about the things that we're talking about um so in that slide what i'm um i mentioned is that if you think really hard sit together both the teams the phenoms or cloud center of excellence teams and the item teams if you look at the charter their goals are pretty much common uh except a few things that have changed due to the evolution of the technology right the the item teams had the responsibility to forecast how much the i.t spending will be they had the responsibility to distribute the spend across the entire organization allocation right they had the responsibility to reduce the waste in software licenses um likewise there's so many things that the i10 teams used to do and now finops teams also have to do the same things right uh it's just that item teams are still struggling with audits that was the only thing that clouds and reflexes teams are not doing right um so so this this import this slide is very powerful to to give you the context that the lessons that you have learned can be reused do not have to be inventor real because your goals are common your goals are safe and it's you know roman it's almost it's almost as if uh the itm teams if you've been a practitioner for you know 15 20 years you've got a you've got a 10 or maybe even a 15-year head start uh on on the same kinds of disciplines right that you might have on the cloud center of excellence only five or seven or you know maybe nine years at the earliest adopters so i think there's there's a lot of overlap and lessons to learn so this is this is excellent um this has been a really insightful session so i'd love to to maybe move forward and kind of we'll go all the way to the end here victor um how should how should customers continue to get value here around cloud insights yeah i mean we had a great conversation with you rohan so thank you again one of the places that i highly recommend our customers to navigate to after these sessions and just throughout their their item journey is the item community consider that your home base from there you'll be able to get access to a lot of our guides so first and foremost the getting started guide is really key because that helps you understand not only other aspects of our itam portfolio but but specific to cloud insights there's a lot of information there about how to set up for success there's links to trainings as well as other documentation that we either referenced today or that we didn't reference today just by the nature of of our limitation with time but there's a lot of information out there that you can get access to so start there at the community there's also ability for you to communicate with other folks in the field that have similar questions that you might be having and if you have general questions a lot of folks in the community are there to answer and help you so i would navigate to that and so with that i mean i i think this was a great conversation rohan again thank you for the time patrick thanks again for for your time as well and to all of you out there we hope this was valuable to you and helpful please join us again in the future we're going to have more of these live event sessions focus on different topics but with that said have a fantastic week and we'll talk to you all soon thank you everyone [Music] [Music] i