Case Study
Pivotree reduces cloud costs and improves visibility for customers
At a glance
Industry: FinTech
Location: Mississauga, Canada
Employees: 550
Products: CloudCheckr, Flexera One Cloud Commitment Management and Spot Ocean
Featured results
- Automated, accurate cloud usage billing for all Pivotree customers
- Optimized reserved commitments across EC2 and RDS workloads
- Less time managing Reserved Instances for greater savings
The challenge
Poor visibility of cloud costs for the company and its customers
Pivotree designs, builds and manages frictionless commerce experiences for customers around the world. Clients rely on them for strategic planning, implementation, support and managed services as they journey toward a frictionless commerce future.
As a managed service provider (MSP) using AWS to deliver their solutions, Pivotree must understand cloud costs themselves and help their customers understand them. In addition, Pivotree constantly looks for ways to maximize the savings on reserved commitments for EC2 and RDS workloads.
To scale their cost optimization efforts and ultimately pass these savings on to their customers, Pivotree needed to replace their existing cost management tool with one that was easier to use and had more reseller-focused functionality. They also needed to develop a more efficient and effective way to optimize their reserved commitments across EC2 and RDS workloads.
The solution
Flexera for optimized cloud costs and reseller-focused FinOps capabilities
Pivotree wanted more confidence in their cloud usage data and a better way to optimize costs. Specifically, they needed a solution that included reseller-focused FinOps capabilities, such as the ability to apply custom charges, automate cost recalculations and leverage committed use discounts. They also wanted cost reporting that could easily facilitate chargeback and showback, as well as automatically populate their invoicing system with monthly billing data.
Pivotree ultimately chose CloudCheckr, Flexera’s robust cloud management platform, to replace their existing cost management tool. They also chose Flexera One Cloud Commitment Management (formerly Spot Eco) for continuous monitoring, management and optimization of their reserved commitment portfolio.
“One of the greatest benefits of the Flexera solutions for FinOps is that we can easily optimize our commitments for each customer, as well as apply custom pricing. Our Finance team can then easily integrate this data with our ERP system and generate accurate and timely bills.”
The result
A strategic FinOps approach
Greater savings and new efficiencies with enhanced billing and cost reporting
Cloud vendor billing reports are incredibly complex, detailed and long—often spanning tens of millions of lines. MSPs need to take this billing data and convert it into individual invoices for their customers. It’s an extremely complicated, time-consuming and error-prone process that is impossible to accurately handle manually. Traditional tools such as spreadsheets and even some cloud-native tools are inadequate for implementing sophisticated billing at scale. As a result, a customer may miss charges off an invoice, lose margin enhancement opportunities or bill the wrong cost center for cloud usage and services they didn’t utilize.
CloudCheckr easily and automatically imports the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), translates the raw usage costs into the correct custom costs and accurately assigns them to the correct customer or cost center. With CloudCheckr, Pivotree can easily analyze and automatically adjust cloud costs for customers, utilizing the vast array of customization options without their team needing to be AWS billing experts.
Less time managing and optimizing RIs
Due to their flexibility and cost savings potential, Pivotree leverages AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) wherever possible. Before deploying Cloud Commitment Management, Pivotree used one-year, low-risk RIs almost exclusively, which yielded lower savings.
Cloud Commitment Management ensures that Pivotree and its customers get the best deals on reserved commitments by implementing tailored purchasing strategies. By leveraging both machine learning algorithms and expert human oversight to analyze resource demand, the solution balances commitments and provides adaptive coverage, saving Pivotree’s FinOps team valuable time and overhead needed to continuously optimize reserved commitments. Additionally, it offers multi-cloud reserved commitment management, covering the broadest types of commitments, and is notably compatible with EC2 and RDS RIs on AWS and Azure Reservations, which Pivotree also uses.
Room to grow
What started as a need to replace an underperforming cost management tool has deepened to Pivotree now adopting more Flexera FinOps solutions, including CloudCheckr, Cloud Commitment Management and Spot Ocean.
Pivotree traditionally provided expert services for e-commerce workloads on static compute resources. As cloud technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, and serverless computing became more common, the need arose for new tools to manage these environments more effectively. In response, Pivotree recently deployed Ocean, Flexera’s container optimization solution, to help them manage the compute infrastructure for these dynamic, mission-critical e-commerce workloads.
When asked what really stands out about Flexera, MacLean said, “With Flexera, you get a complete solution, not just great technology. Flexera has a great portfolio of products, but the number one benefit is its customer success model. This is complex data, and no tool can handle that alone without having people ready to hear your issues and be creative on how to solve them. We love the tool, but the difference maker for us is working with the Flexera team.”
“With Flexera, we get security, cost and performance data in one platform.”