Executive summary
For SaaS companies, optimizing cloud spend is an operational imperative. Hyland, a leading global provider of intelligent content solutions, uses Apptio Cloudability to increase cloud cost transparency and gain data-driven insight that helps reduce cloud spend, increase efficiency, and inform product development — all to deliver exceptional service to its customers.
Company overview
Hyland provides industry-leading intelligent content solutions that empower customers to deliver exceptional experiences to the people they serve. Trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 100, Hyland’s solutions connect systems and manage high volumes of diverse content to improve, accelerate, and automate processes and workflows.
The challenge
In 2019, Hyland began to accelerate its cloud modernization efforts by adding public cloud provider AWS to their Hyland Cloud offering. Moving to AWS allowed Hyland the ability to scale as it supports its growing enterprise platform offerings (inclusive of OnBase, Nuxeo, and Alfresco) and eliminate the need for Hyland to build additional data centers requiring the purchase of servers, management of new facilities, and maintenance of additional infrastructure.
Hyland pursued this with a multi-phased approach. The first phase was primarily a “lift and shift” operation, moving its legacy products from on-premises infrastructure to AWS with few application changes. This enabled Hyland to begin reducing its dependency on private data centers. The second phase is focused on improving its platforms to become more cloud native and optimizing the use of native cloud services to minimize cost and maximize performance. Hyland found that to fully utilize the power of AWS, it first needed to increase the transparency and confidence in the operation of its AWS cloud usage.
The solution
This challenge prompted Hyland to explore cloud cost management (CCM) offerings. According to Joseph Quinto, Hyland’s cloud business operations manager, Hyland was able to fast-track its selection of a CCM product thanks to the analysis done by the company Nuxeo, which Hyland acquired in 2021.
“Nuxeo landed with Cloudability in 2018 because it needed to better understand our cloud customer cost profile,” Quinto said. “We looked at several CCM tools and chose Cloudability because it was easy to use and inherently knows AWS cost data. Data in Cloudability gives a real-time view of what cost looks like by service type, tags, and usage pattern — the parts that are innately part of AWS-hosted solutions.”
With Cloudability being a win for Nuxeo, Hyland’s leaders chose to expand its use across the other products in the company’s portfolio.
The results
Savings in cloud costs
As a PaaS/SaaS company, Hyland provides several service offerings. When a new customer selects a hosted solution and is onboarded, Hyland builds and manages the environments to meet the needs of the customer. The size of the environment can vary widely, depending on the offering selected, the usage of the platform by its users, and the amount of content stored by the product.
Serving thousands of customers requires Hyland to manage a significant AWS footprint, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and EBS volumes — all amounting to petabytes of data and thousands of services. Quinto’s cloud operations team members act as business stewards of the Hyland Cloud offering. They work with different business and technical teams, including DevOps teams, to make sure the company is optimizing the use of cloud resources for each customer environment to maximize return on investment while delivering exceptional service to the customer.
“We partner with other teams to make it transparent how we manage and operate our cloud customer environments,” Quinto said.
Cloudability has given Quinto and his team the information they need to provide that transparency, which has helped the company make better use of cloud resources and reduce cloud spend.
“If we see resources being allocated to a customer beyond what we think should be there, we start to ask questions,” Quinto said. “In a lot of cases, the resources are not needed all the time and can be made available on an as-needed basis. We reduce costs by taking action based on what appears in Cloudability. For example, we recently started using a new version of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Cloudability showed a significant cost increase related to Amazon RDS. We were able to update a setting that reduced our Amazon RDS cost by more than 50%. The insight from Cloudability allows us to reduce our cloud costs by a significant amount.”
Improved efficiency
One benefit of Cloudability is its comprehensive view into resource utilization. This functionality gives Hyland a more accurate understanding of what it takes to deliver its cloud offerings to customers. The transparency helps Hyland avoid overprovisioning compute and storage resources and make proactive suggestions based on data.
“Cloudability is helping us operate more efficiently and make improvements where we can measure margin by customer,” Quinto said. “By being better informed, we can also better price our offering to new customers.”
Greater influence on business decisions
Making the move from private cloud to public cloud includes a shift from a CapEx to an OpEx model and an internal mindset change within Hyland. Cloudability has helped this transformation.
“It’s a different way for us to sell and manage our business,” Quinto said. “Cloudability gives us better transparency and provides a tangible way for us to really show people our cloud environments in a format they had never seen in the past. Our team doesn’t need to take my word for it; the data speaks for itself. This mindset shift is evolving, and Cloudability is helping move the needle in that direction.”
Cloudability has become an essential tool for Quinto’s operations team. They use it nearly every day to address anomalies, answer ad-hoc questions, and provide cost analysis in the form of monthly and quarterly reports and updates on findings and trends.
“Every month, we look at costs across all our cloud teams and make sure we understand our spend and feel good about where that spend is going,” Quinto said. “Then we meet with our sales teams, products teams, and executives every quarter to give them guidance and insight into what we are seeing.”
Providing cloud teams information on a regular basis is helping Hyland make engineering decisions that Quinto feels will not only help the company operate more efficiently but also influence product development.
“One of our products is very database-intensive. Cloudability has provided us with more actionable data that is helping us to change where and how we can improve our usage of database services for these products,” Quinto said. “In addition, Cloudability data is getting surfaced up to the board and executives, and it is helping drive where we want to get to from a transparency perspective and what we think of as the right KPI metrics for managing our business.”
Next steps
According to Quinto, Cloudability provides greater transparency than Hyland had seen before, and this has helped the company both reduce and optimize cloud spend. However, he sees even more benefits on the horizon.
“We have seen benefits on the product development side, but we know there is more to gain, so that is an area of focus for us going forward,” he said. “We also want to expose Cloudability to more teams across the company and improve our budgeting process. With Cloudability, we plan to evaluate our spend and cost profile quarterly so we can better understand and adapt to changes in our business.”
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