Why Spot by NetApp is ahead of the Wave

Forrester Research recently published its Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Solutions, Q3 2024 Wave report in which Spot by NetApp is recognized as one of the 12 most significant vendors in the space. However, Spot by NetApp decided not to participate in this research process given that its Cloud Cost Management products, Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine, were not yet Generally Available (GA) when the research questionnaire was due earlier in the year.

Delivering on our commitments to customers

On June 20, 2024, we announced the GA of Billing Engine and Cost Intelligence (version 1.0). Part of our FinOps offering, Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine are built upon market-leading CloudCheckr capabilities, as well as incorporate new functionality based on customer, FinOps, and industry requests, requirements, and standards. Both products are now available within the Spot console and support AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

• Cost Intelligence delivers panoramic visibility with actionable insights on cloud costs, resources, and usage across multi-cloud environments through interactive dashboards and drill down reports. To support the cost optimization process, Cost Intelligence provides best practice checks that immediately flag problems and a workflow builder to help users optimize spend, maximize resource utilization, reduce waste, and address misconfigurations.
• Billing Engine provides comprehensive billing reporting with intelligent cost allocation capabilities including chargeback and showback. With this product, businesses can better track and manage cloud spend across different groups to drive accountability.

Together with the GA announcement, we also announced that Billing Engine and Cost Intelligence support the newly released v1.0 of the FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) open-source specification, which normalizes cloud provider data to produce consistent cost and usage datasets that enable an integrated view of cloud cost data.

Focusing on solving the root causes of FinOps

Hand in hand with launching these new cloud cost management capabilities, our mission is to deliver the next generation solutions for FinOps. This means enabling our customers to go beyond focusing on cost savings by giving them the technology and a framework to drive a cultural shift across their organizations. This empowers them to solve the root causes of their FinOps challenges, not just the symptoms.

We are doing this by delivering an integrated portfolio of products that includes Cost Intelligence and Billing Engine, Spot Eco for automated commitment management, and Spot Ocean and Spot Elastigroup for automated infrastructure optimization. Collectively, this offering for FinOps unifies and automates cloud cost management and infrastructure optimization processes while delivering intelligent data to align stakeholders, drive accountability, and maximize the business value of cloud.

The Spot by NetApp FinOps offering helps our customers by:

• Removing management overhead and barriers between infrastructure management and traditional FinOps to align the people, tools, and processes necessary to achieve FinOps success.
• Giving stakeholders holistic visibility, accurate data and the context to understand how costs impact workload requirements and empower them to make informed business decisions.​
• Achieving maximum cost savings together with optimal resource efficiencies​, in alignment with the organization’s business needs.
• Using intelligent automation with application-aware and AI-driven predictive provisioning and scaling of cloud infrastructure  (VMs, containers, Kubernetes) to ensure that the infrastructure continuously delivers optimal quality of service (performance, reliability, cost-efficiency, etc.) for each workload, including mission-critical ones.​
• Automatically, accurately and transparently allocating cloud costs to the cost centers, such as teams, product, lines of business, or any other company-defined parameter. ​
• Providing the data to help drive a strong FinOps culture across the organization that fosters stakeholder alignment, collaboration, accountability, and shared responsibility for cloud.

In May 2024, the full Spot by NetApp FinOps solution suite was certified by the FinOps Foundation as a FinOps certified platform. This certification is predicated on our ability to demonstrate support for all the key FinOps Foundation capabilities as well as our commitment to supporting the FinOps framework and best practices. At the same time, analyst firm GigaOm ranked the Spot by NetApp FinOps offering a leader and outperformer in its Radar for the third consecutive year!

Spot by NetApp enables organizations to easily and continuously optimize their infrastructure efficiency and utilization while maximizing the impact of every dollar they spend in the cloud – without sacrificing flexibility or reliability or risking financial lock-in. Spot by NetApp delivers the true value of FinOps by addressing the fundamental FinOps challenges.

Learn more about Spot by NetApp’s solution for FinOps.