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“It’s very user friendly. Within minutes, you can generate a report and get answers. You don’t have to be an expert.”
For Epsilon, a global technology, data, and services company, making the best use of cloud spend is a business imperative. To maximize benefits from AWS’s MAP program, the company’s FinOps team leaned on IBM Cloudability’s rich feature set to:
Epsilon is a technology, data, and services company that allows marketers to bridge the divide between marketing and advertising technology and harmonize consumer engagement across their paid, owned, and earned channels. The company offers a wide range of capabilities such as identity resolution, customer data platforms, clean rooms, digital media, retail media, site personalization, direct mail, loyalty, email marketing, and measurement. Founded in 1969, Epsilon has grown into a global organization with over 8,000 employees and more than 40 offices around the world.
As a data and technology company, Epsilon has a complex, multi-cloud IT estate. With a large cloud presence spanning Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, optimizing cloud costs is a business priority.
The company’s FinOps team, led by Director of Cloud Financial Operations, Puja Kosarkar, has evolved into a mature operation. Their group of analysts and engineers focuses on allocating cloud costs to teams, forecasting costs based on trends, maintaining high standards for cloud usage, and ensuring costs remain optimized.
To aid them in this work, the team developed an in-house application for analyzing cloud billing data. But as the business evolved and demand grew, they needed more granular optimization reporting than could be produced from their in-house tool.
“We needed to empower our team and give them a tool that allowed them to quickly and easily generate reports and pull optimization data,” Puja said.
Epsilon’s FinOps team performed market research, reviewed product information, and conducted trials of seven different solutions before making a selection. According to Puja, due to their large cloud footprint, Epsilon has an advanced FinOps function, so her team members are very capable and have a great deal of knowledge. Their experience enabled them to compare and contrast products and determine which one did the best job of meeting the company’s needs.
At the end of the evaluation period, the team selected IBM Cloudability. “One great thing about Cloudability is its reporting feature,” Puja said. “It’s very user friendly. Within minutes, you can generate a report and get answers. You don’t have to be an expert.”
Epsilon implemented IBM Cloudability in April 2024. After their onboarding period, the company has used the solution to enhance its FinOps practice in many ways:
The initial use case for Epsilon to implement IBM Cloudability was to improve the company’s ability to optimize cloud spending. Today, the FinOps team uses the in-depth rightsizing recommendations within IBM Cloudability for all three cloud providers—AWS, GCP, and Azure. This intuitive capability gives the team comprehensive analytics covering their total cloud spend and surfaces multiple options with supporting data to drive possible savings. According to Puja, the detailed reporting helps her team make recommendations to business groups across the company.
“Cloudability shows us the best-case scenario and the least-case scenario in terms of how much can be saved, which I personally think is very good,” she said. “That allows us to present business groups with options. For example, sometimes we can show a group that they can save significant cost by switching to a different instance. But switching may be too painful for them, and they choose not to do it. Either way, the decision is theirs to make.”
In addition to rightsizing, Epsilon uses IBM Cloudability for commitment-based discounts. The combination of forecasting along with detailed recommendations for AWS Savings Plans and GCP Committed-Use Discounts (CUDs) significantly boosted Epsilon’s ability to reach a high level of coverage for optimized discount pricing.
“We used flexible CUD last year and it gave us really good results,” Puja said. “Cloudability helps us monitor it. For one of our projects, we reached 95% coverage.”
As Epsilon’s AWS presence grew, the company wanted to take advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) as much as possible to reduce costs. But staying abreast of continuous rule changes in the program and making sure resources were properly tagged and credits were accurately tracked and distributed to different groups was a time-consuming effort for the FinOps team. To make the work easier, Puja immersed herself in the details of how the MAP program works and developed a manual process using Excel to help manage credit recovery.
The implementation of IBM Cloudability opened up a new opportunity. In partnership with her Apptio team, Puja created a customized MAP credit calculation report by blending her knowledge of the MAP process workflow with the data import, tagging, and reporting features of IBM Cloudability.
“Our engineer from Apptio took my documentation and process and built coding for it in Cloudability and TBM Studio,” Puja said. “He put in the rules and the criteria. Now, instead of manipulating 15 tabs in an Excel file, I get a single-page MAP credit report.”
This custom capability enabled Epsilon to move from a manual process to an automated one. Data is pulled from the AWS portal using Datalink connections. And raw files are then transformed and filtered down based on selective criteria. The result allows the FinOps team to:
According to Puja, this functionality within IBM Cloudability has saved her team time and is delivering tangible financial results.
“Identifying missed opportunities is so much easier now,” she said. “Before, we were talking to hundreds of people, educating them, making them aware that we are signed up for MAP. Now, we can see where we are missing tags, which means we might only need to talk to five or six different accounts. So far, from July 2024 through April 2025, we have seen a 200% increase in expected MAP credits.”
IBM Cloudability has drastically increased Epsilon’s AWS MAP credits as well as their AWS and GCP commitment spend coverage, resulting in significant savings across the organization. In addition, Epsilon enhanced their FinOps function, simplifying many processes and providing fast access to insightful information. Moving forward, Puja says she is exploring new ways to further leverage IBM Cloudability’s features to improve her team’s operation. “Cloudability’s reporting tools are second to none,” she said.
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