hi everyone and welcome to service now techbit bringing you an inside look at our products I'm your host Steve Miller today we're going to talk with product manager Abby Roy about Cloud cost management which helps businesses manage the cost of their Cloud resources across multiple Cloud platforms stay tuned today I'm glad to welcome Abby Roy to our virtual Studio thank you for joining us Obby yeah great to be with you Steve well before we dive into Cloud cost management I wonder if you could tell our listeners just what you do here at service now what's your role here yeah so I'm a senior outbound product manager at service now and I sit in the asset management business unit and I specifically cover our product Cloud cost management which is our fops tool all right how long have you been here at service now yeah I've been here over a year and a half coming up on my 2-year Mark in June so it's been a really great experience and journey so far and how about when you're not at work what do you like to do yeah so I live in San Francisco and one of the things that's really nice about living here it's so close to Nature it's really easy to go on really picturesque hikes and that's something that I like to do every week and on top of that I've been a musician my whole life I play the drums and I really enjoy doing that whether it's by myself or with other people in bands that's those things keep me busy outside of work all right so let's talk about Cloud cost management I wonder if you could give us all a quick intro to it what is the field of cloud cost management in general and how does service now's Cloud cost management product fit into that yeah see that's a really great question the field of cloud cost management is really concerned with the uncertainty and waste that has grown ac across uh Cloud spend and this is something where because Cloud costs are variable for companies they're not a fixed cost it's caused a lot of uncertainty for companies which has created problems where they have difficulty of forecasting Cloud costs they have low visibility and accounting into these costs often times they could run over budget oftentimes they are unable to really see and have visibility into okay am I spending too much on particular assets or I'm not spending as much what are the trends that I'm seeing in spending what are anomalies that I'm having in spending and collectively all of these issues have created a situation where companies are having to pay millions of dollars more than they expected startups have almost gone bankrupt because of this and it's estimated that at least 30% of $180 billion do of the nearly 600 billion on cloud spend globally is entirely unnecessary there's just not a lot of accountability on this so on the backdrop of this problem this is where the field of cloud cost management comes into place and the other term that is very common around this is called finops or financial operations that's just a way of taking a handle on cloud costs what are ways in which we go about controlling the spend but specifically the first thing is creating accountability so showing who is spending and how much and then the second is optimizing assets so you can do things like resize or remove based on usage and the third is automating and collaborating so this is automating as many optimization actions as possible and making it easy to collaborate and keep on audit so Cloud cost management at service now we excel at reporting on cloud spend on aiding Cloud spend as well as alert on spend thresholds we have really powerful and robust cost optimization features including identifying Cloud waste correcting inefficiencies and then really importantly we have savings automation which automates savings ATT tracks recommendations and also change control so with that would really come into this space where service now has this endtoend Cloud cost management capability that works at R the multicloud it works with AWS Azure as well as gcp it has a bunch of cost optimization insights policy driven workflows and the outcomes that customers have gotten from this including the ability to track their Cloud spend automate their Cloud spend optimize recommend ations as well as forecast spend great intro thank you while you were explaining a question occurred to me the kind of concerns that you describe here for cloud cost management it seems like a number of those would apply to other forms of cost management as well and I'm wondering what are the particular difficulties with managing Cloud costs the difficulties that this product helps address yeah so there are a lot of difficulties in terms of managing Cloud costs the one difficulty that customers have is often times they are having difficulties managing multic cloud workloads and environments this is something where we really step in and we give visibility into AWS as well as Azure and gcp and we have a powerful normalization engine where when they go up on our homepage and they have this uh spending graph on the that they can view what they can see is that they can not only see the spending by provider themselves but they can actually see how much they're spending by Cloud assets so they can see how much they're spending on an overall basis of compute resources as well as network resources as well as storage resources and that's very powerful and then they can actually go in and click in on those spending graphs and they could actually do something which is called showback and charge back which is where they can take these costs and actually slice and dice them based on of various tags like business unit or cost center or geography and actually go and show individual teams how much they are spending on these Cloud resources so that when they can go and hold those teams accountable they're able to do it in a much Accurate Way building off of that another challenge that a lot of these companies are facing is that they might understand recommendations that are popping up but then it's really difficult to actually go about enacting them to make sure that there is an audit trail of these recommendations to understanding what stakeholder has to do what and that's really where our product shines and which through we have our change management integration so happy to talk about that more but these are just some of the ways where we are addressing some of the biggest problems that customers are facing in this space well thank you that's a good addition to the overview so one of the things I really enjoy about doing these podcasts is learning about the history of our products and the fields that they apply to and I wonder if you could give us a little background on CCM both the field itself and the product yeah absolutely so to cost management and service now we have had this product for a while and it's been a product where we've had rapid customer Centric Innovation so the asset management bu at service now we took over the product from iton in our Quebec release which was March 2021 and we've had twice a year Family releases where we've really focused on making this product a comprehensive endtoend finop solution for our customers and so some of the things that we've added over these releases is support for multicloud so we've added support for AWS Azure as well as gcp and we have done a lot of innovation specifically on the optimization side so we have added features around right sizing resources around setting business hour policy so you're not running resources 247 and wasting money that way we have added support for reservation and saving plan we have added the ability to spin off unused resources and then on top of this we have innovated a lot in terms of tag categories as well as kubernetes as well as a lot of shared cost allocation support and so these are just areas where we have basically taken a pulse on the market seeing what are the latest trends and then stay ahead of that curve and we've been really proud of that particular progress so with our software Asset Management product combined that with Cloud cost management we have access to an executive asset dashboard which will show that sea level Persona uh bird's eye view into total cost of ownership in terms of cloud in terms of software we can also integrate that with Hardware Asset Management so they can see what the hardware spend is as well and then we also have other features like Cloud cost simulator where a customer they can see what it costs to keep their assets on premise and then if they were to move to a cloud like Azure or AWS it could basically show what that cost would look like in the cloud as opposed to keeping it on Fus and it keeps in mind things like bring your own license as well as specific vendor based discounts so those are some of the few ways where we really do Leverage The Power of the service now platform and Integrations as well as a product Innovation itself you mentioned keeping up with Trends in the industry I can see how the field of cloud cost management man it's a fast evolving feat and I'm just wondering how do you keep up with the market trends and Technology Trends do you work a lot with customers to do that yes we work very closely with our customers in the Pro product advisory Council or the pack we will work uh very closely with analysts for example and we also just keep a post on the market seeing what is happening in terms of like various industry based conferences through the phoms foundation and other areas and an example of of us doing this is that in our Washington release we are rolling out kubernetes spend management or container spend management as well as share cost allocation so we've seen a lot of obviously a lot of companies in the cloud space move more towards a kubernetes environment and with that it's really important to make sure that we can have showback and charge back show what individual teams are spending because a lot of these resources are shared that can be difficult to do so that's a very powerful Innovation that we're rolling out in Washington for this pain point for a lot of customers so service now focuses on workflows how does cloud cost management fit into that workflow perspective yeah so one powerful integration that cloud cost management has is with change management and this is really important because for many years a top problem for fops organizations and companies has been the inability for engineers take action on recommendations either they inability or their unwillingness to do it so Abby let me ask you a quick question just to make sure I understand you've mentioned recommendations a couple times what are those are those things that the recommendations that the product makes yeah yeah that's a great question our product within Cloud cost management there it shows a lot of recommendations that you can do to actually optimize your Cloud spend so it not only has insights into visibility and Reporting as well as budgets but it really does show recommendations on how to get those potential Savings in the cloud and it's a very robust and multifaceted the one of the major recommendations is rightsizing resources and so it will basically take a look at how much you're spending compared to your usage levels and then it can say that hey maybe we should uh downsize this particular resource or maybe we should actually increase this particular Resource as well just based on your usage and your um spending Trends and then on top of that we have a way of setting business hours for different Cloud assets so that you're not running a resource 24/7 you could actually set specific on and off hours for that this is important because this is again a very big driver of wasted Cloud spending another source of wasted Cloud spending is unused assets where you're just not using Cloud asset at all and our system identifies that and then gives recommendations for shutting down those assets complet and then the other one is not using committed discounts and this is where our Cloud cost management recommendation comes in where we make sure that reserved compute and savings plans are being used properly you're getting the maximum savings out of that possible these are the very large major recommendations that we have we have a whole entire module in gloud cost management where you can go there is a chart where they'll not only show you what these recommendations are but it'll actually break it down and show this is where this percentage of the recommendation is coming from so it might say that right sizing accounts for 80% of the total potential savings so you know where to prioritize your time and when you click on that and you go even further you can say oh okay specifically within right sizing compute resources are the ones where it's driving maybe 60% of the savings so this will give a fops manager or practitioner the ability to really prioritize and understand the major drivers of spending and potential wasteful spending thank you helps me understand what those Rec recommendations are and I'm sorry I guess I knocked you off your track there you were talking about change management in the context of cloud cost management yeah so with change management this is when after you do those recommendations that I mentioned to you just earlier when you schedule a job say for right sizing or for setting business hours after you go ahead and do that then you can actually go and you can track the life cycle of that job so say that you create a right sizing job and we have the ability to actually set that job for auto approval or manual approval and what we've noticed is that customers who are still earlier on their adoption stage with Cloud cost management they often set it to manual approval where it routes to individual stakeholders to U make comments and approve different workflows this is as opposed to Auto approval where through the Integrations and the apis we can actually go and automatically enact recommendations like resizing resources or setting business hours but with the manual approval approach what it will do is it will create like a change record it'll rout it to particular stakeholders and then the person who made this request they can essentially track which of these requests have been scheduled which of them are pending which of them have been declined which of them have been excluded for example this really gives them the ability to follow up with particular stakeholders see what their notes are if they gets declined they can go back with that stakeholder build a better case for that and this is just a central way of getting that stakeholder Buy in into Cloud cost management and also a way of ensuring that these recommendations make it to the Finish Line they just don't stay stuck in this pending stage they make it to the finish line and Engineers are actually incentivized to take action on these particular recommendations they're actually enacted so all this takes place within Cloud cost management all this change management rigor is provided directly within the application right yes that is true BBY maybe you can tell us a little bit about how companies would integrate Cloud cost management into their operations yeah absolutely so one thing that is great about Cloud cost management is we have a guided setup page and this is something when you open up the cloud cost management workspace on the left hand side we have our navigation bar you can click on this page will bring you to our guided setup admin page and with that we have a very stepbystep hand held version of guided setup where intellectually show you which Integrations and plugins need to be enacted and then when you actually go and integrate through these uh providers it will actually just again it'll link you to knowledge-based articles that have a checklist format where you can make sure that these Integrations are happening successfully and intuitively so you have that aspect of it as well and the other aspect is we we have uh a product overview page on the guided setup page where you can really take a look at knowledge articles on videos on best practices around Cloud cost management and then we have a section where it actually shows a lot of Better Together capabilities where as I mentioned before with software asset management and Hardware Asset Management there's a link to the asset executive dashboard which is where you get that bird's eye executive level overview over a cloud spend over software spend over Hardware spend we have a link to the cloud cost simulator which shows again like if you have workloads on premise and if you were to move them to the cloud what the cost would be for each and so you could understand what the savings would be once you move more these on premise assets to the cloud that way and it takes into account things like bring your own license as well as vendor-based recommendations and discounts that way and also are a lot of powerful like synergies and workflows within it operations management or iton products things like Cloud visibility as well as Cloud accelerate and governance as well as tagging and so the these are areas where Cloud cost management really Builds on the powerful workflows of the service now platform as a whole it sits on the same unified architecture the one data model and because of this it's both powerful as an isolated Cloud cost management finops tool but with service now it's even better with again all of these synergies and Integrations before we wrap up here is there anything else you'd like to mention for our listeners yeah so if you're interested in learning more about Cloud cost management you can go to the service now website we have a community page where we have a welcome guide and we have form post on questions that people have about Cloud cost management and best practices we also have a comprehensive repository of product document on our doc site where it will show things on how to get started with Cloud cost management how to get value out of it how to integrate it and Etc so we do have a lot of resources for people who are interested in learning more all right thank you very much Abby it's great to have you join us today for me it's been a great introduction to Cloud cost management and hopefully for our listeners too yeah it was a great session and and glad that you enjoyed it and hope our audience did as well please tell us what you think of this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more information on any service now topic take a look at our product documentation or knowledge based or our service now support YouTube channel thanks for listening [Music]