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“Before implementing Cloudability Savings Automation, our coverage was not very good, but now, our coverage is always well above 80% and usually close to 100%, with an average discount rate of 35%-40%.”
For MoxiWorks, public cloud is critical for business growth. Delivering best-in-class services for their customers means creating new, innovative cloud-based offerings that are high-performing and always available. Cloudability Savings Automation helped the company reduce the cost of compute resources by 40%, enabling them to increase their cloud footprint without a huge spike in their budget.
MoxiWorks provides cloud-based software solutions for mid-sized and enterprise residential real estate brokerages. The company’s open platform offers a variety of product offerings, including the industry’s leading CRM, comparative market analysis (CMA)/presentation tool, advertising solutions, recruiting tool, and website builder, and it also integrates with the multiple listing service (MLS).
Originally started as the technology arm of Windermere Real Estate in Seattle, Washington, MoxiWorks was officially founded in 2012. The business has tripled in size in the last three years as a result of acquisitions, an increase in customers, and growth in sales of the company’s product offerings. Today, MoxiWorks solutions are used by more than 800 brokerages with over 400,000 agents across the US and Canada.
As a cloud-based solution provider, MoxiWorks has steadily migrated away from on-premises infrastructure to public cloud, with the majority of its cloud presence residing in Amazon Web Services (AWS). While the company still operates a hybrid IT model, the corporate objective is to move as much as possible to cloud to gain flexibility, reduce downtime, modernize applications, and increase innovation.
But as the company’s cloud footprint increased, so did the need for better cost insights. “Cost management is an ongoing concern,” said Ernie Joseph, director of platform operations at MoxiWorks. “It’s easy to spin things up, and costs can get out of control pretty quickly.”
To lower the cost of cloud services, MoxiWorks took advantage of commitment-based discounting from AWS. Their discount strategy was comprised of a variety of options, including Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances.
In the beginning, they self-managed the commitment program. But as Joseph explained, there are a lot of variations to consider and details to keep track of — one-year versus three-year terms; varying expiration dates; partial up-front, no upfront, all upfront payment options — and they did not have a dedicated person assigned to the task.
“It became a ton to manage,” he said. “We had to get the program nailed down. And as our spend increased rapidly, we needed to make sure we were doing the right things to manage cost.”
It was September 2022 when MoxiWorks began looking for a solution to help them manage their commitment program. They considered several products and selected Cloudability Savings Automation (CSA). Joseph attributed the personal nature of working with Apptio as a key differentiator in their decision.
“I felt like Apptio was invested in our success,” he said. “With any automated system, it’s easy to feel like you are just dealing with robots. But with Apptio, it’s not like that — it’s an ongoing relationship. We have regular meetings to review our program and discuss ways to make it better.”
The company implemented Cloudability Savings Automation in October 2022, and according to Joseph, the process could not have gone any smoother. “The implementation was so easy, it was ridiculous,” he said. “With CSA only requiring read access to our AWS CUR file, within a week, we were seeing detailed data related to additional savings opportunities and starting to work on plans and strategies to lower our costs.”
Commitment-based discounting enables organizations to lower their hourly rates for cloud services in exchange for committing to specific types of usage over a defined term. The longer the term, the higher the discount.
Cloudability Savings Automation uses a combination of Compute Savings Plans and Convertible Reserved Instances to help companies maximize savings by delivering high commitment coverage at three-year discount rates.
“The ability to exchange Reserved Instances to get term flexibility really got our attention,” Joseph said. “We were able to get three-year level discounts with Convertible RIs without lengthening our commitments. We didn’t have to add a bunch of three-year Reserved Instances. So, our overall commitment length didn’t change, but our savings level increased.”
According to Joseph, this unique approach has enabled MoxiWorks to increase their overall coverage (the total amount of spend covered by a discount program) and significantly reduce their cloud costs.
“Before implementing Cloudability Savings Automation, our coverage was not very good,” he said. “But now, our coverage is always well above 80% and usually close to 100%, with an average discount rate of 35%-40%.”
One of the benefits of Cloudability Savings Automation is that organizations no longer need to spend a lot of time managing their commitment program to ensure they are getting maximum savings on their cloud spend. Joseph said, for him, the benefit of the transition from self-management to automation was less about saving him time and more about feeling confident that opportunities for savings were not being missed.
“I was spending about five hours a week on our commitment program,” he said. “But it was a scattershot approach. Not having the time to focus on the program was really costing the organization more than the actual cost of my time.”
With Cloudability Savings Automation, MoxiWorks no longer has to worry about tracking expiration dates or commitment coverage — the product monitors that for them, reports on key metrics, and automatically makes adjustments to maximize coverage at three-year discount rates. This saves Joseph time and ensures the company always pays the lowest possible rate for services.
“I get an overview of our accounts twice a week, and then I have a bi-monthly meeting with our technical advocate to discuss our results, which takes 15-30 minutes,” he said. “The benefit of CSA is that all of this is managed without much involvement from us, which is amazing.”
As MoxiWorks continues to grow, Joseph sees the company’s biggest opportunities for gaining new customers and market share coming through innovation, modernizing applications, and developing new features and offerings. This is one area where Cloudability Savings Automation has made a real difference to their business.
“As we modernize applications and continue to move things further into the cloud, we are offsetting costs on the other side,” he said. “We’ve grown 25% in actual usage of AWS services, but our overall costs have only increased about 4%. So, we’re seeing a big increase in our cloud footprint, but not a huge increase in cost.”
Cloudability Savings Automation has helped MoxiWorks move closer to its goals by enabling them to move more infrastructure to the cloud without a corresponding increase in costs. And this has allowed the company to pursue innovation, something Joseph sees as critical to the company’s success moving forward.
“We are going to continue growing our presence in the cloud, modernizing applications, and increasing our scalability to deliver best-in-class service,” he said. “We are doing everything our executive team wants us to do. As a director, there’s nothing better for me than to be able to tell our executives that we are getting better, faster, more innovative and creative and not spending any more money doing it.”
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