We want to hear from you!

Hello, our fellow IT Financial Management professionals, welcome to 2021. Last year, we saw strength and fierceness from many of you, as you helped your organizations stay lean and resilient in front of the global pandemic. This year, as the world is still coping with the post-vaccine new normal, cost efficiency and optimization will remain at the top of the agenda, and technology resources investment and utilization will still be under close scrutiny.

Although we are only Business Day 3 into 2021, our team have already jumped right back into the swing of things. Your user experience is at the center of everything we build. As we can see from the dusted-off gem – Amazon Flywheel, customer experience is one of the critical components in our growth mental model.

Customer Feedback

We have established several channels to understand and connect with you, a) inviting you to be beta users for our products under development, b) meeting with you in 1:1 settings, c) setting up booths and workshops during major AWS events, and d) providing platforms for peer discussions.

During our interactions with you, we’ve seen common focuses and pain points. As critical as IT Financial Management is, dedicated resources is still limited. On average, we see teams made of 1-3 professionals, who are also wearing multiple hats of DevOps, finance, and operations. You want to improve the cost transparency and forecasting accuracy. Cost optimization initiatives in various formats, e.g. detecting and removing waste, leveraging purchase options, are being monitored and implemented. To the extent that some of you now view any resource usage that is not covered by Reserved Instances or Savings Plans as overage.  You want the access control capabilities based on the hierarchical level and business needs, to protect the viewing, sharing, and editing rights for your cost and usage information.

If you have questions regarding our cost management products, you can submit these in our AWS Forum – Cost Management Channel

We are working on incorporating what we learned from you into our product development and will keep you informed of the new and enhanced capabilities, as they become available on our product website and blog channel.

Peer Learning & Sharing

Last year, we launched the Customer Success Case Study program, with the intent to showcase customer achievements in their IT Financial Management journey and encourage the peer-to-peer learning.  You can find these stories in our customer stories portal (https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/customer-stories/). Below is a quick highlight of three stories.

• Wildlife Studios, a rapidly growing gaming company from Brazil, looked for ways to understand and reduce their AWS spend.  With the cost transparency, they were able to get metrics, e.g. Amazon EC2 spend per normalized unit, and use the data to make better forecasting and purchase option decisions.
• MicroStrategy, a leading business intelligence company, rolled out their top-down cost optimization initiative with a hub-and-spoke model. They also established mechanisms, e.g. daily shutdown, idle instance detection, to make sure resources are being utilized in the most optimized way.
• Lyft, the leading ridesharing company in US, built their in-house reporting tool to better understand their AWS billing and usage. The business outcome driven KPI, e.g. the AWS spend per Lyft ride, drove waves of cost optimization effort inside the organization.

Join Us

We welcome ITFM professionals like you to share your story with us.  Come meet your peers and exchange learnings in one of our upcoming AWS Cloud Financial Management Peer Connect events. Register for the next event and/or join our interest list to stay tuned for future events.  Nominate yourself to be featured in our Customer Success Case Study program.  Email us (cfm-casestudies@amazon.com) and include your company name, your full name and job title in the organization, and a brief introduction of your ITFM story.