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“Cloudability has helped us bridge the gap between technical, financial, and business stakeholders when it comes to cloud costs.”
As a rapidly growing organization, Visma faced significant challenges managing cloud expenses across its decentralized and diverse environment. Implementing Cloudability dramatically transformed the company’s approach to cloud cost management, delivering a cost saving of up to 15% per subsidiary through targeted optimizations. Cloudability enhanced cross-functional collaboration between technical and financial teams and significantly improved sustainability practices by enabling comprehensive tracking of carbon emissions, positioning the company as a leader in cost-effective, responsible cloud usage.
Visma is a privately-held company headquartered in Oslo, Norway. With over 400 unique products, Visma is a leading provider of cloud accounting, payroll, invoicing, and tax software for small and medium-sized businesses and public sector clients across Europe and Latin America. The organization is comprised of over 180 companies—each having business autonomy and go-to-market freedom. Founded in 1996, Visma has more than 17,500 employees and 2.1 million customers.
Growth is a constant at Visma, from both organic means and through acquisition. The company’s aggressive business strategy involves acquiring between 30 and 40 new companies a year, significantly expanding its operational footprint. Central to its strategy is a strong commitment to cloud-first infrastructure, partnering with leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Approximately 94% of the company’s annual recurring revenue comes from cloud-hosted products.
The complexity of managing such an extensive and decentralized multi-cloud environment created significant challenges. Each subsidiary maintains substantial autonomy, making it difficult for Visma to achieve cohesive visibility and control over its escalating cloud expenditures. To manage costs, the organization depended heavily on native cost management tools provided by each cloud vendor, resulting in fragmented insights and inconsistent cost management practices. The lack of unified oversight led to inefficiencies, missed opportunities for savings, and heightened pressure on both financial and technical teams.
“Some parts of the organization were really good at managing costs, but many others were not,” said Alexander Lystad, Group CTO at Visma. “That was the main problem we wanted to address.”
Recognizing these operational challenges, Visma conducted a thorough vendor evaluation. IBM Cloudability was selected as the preferred solution due to its comprehensive multi-cloud capabilities and ability to provide a unified view of cloud expenses.
Though Visma gained value from the initial implementation of Cloudability, they realized quickly that to maximize the reduction of uncovered waste, build a true FinOps practice to maturity, and take full advantage of what the solution had to offer, they needed to broaden the internal attention and intensify their efforts with a more structured approach.
To accomplish this, Visma quickly adapted its strategy by establishing a dedicated central FinOps team and began cultivating a broader community of practice across its subsidiaries. This shift proved transformative, significantly elevating Visma’s cloud cost management approach and overall FinOps maturity.
Cloudability provided Visma with unified visibility across all its cloud environments. This allowed the newly empowered central FinOps team to easily pinpoint areas for cost-saving opportunities without having to rely on fragmented tools.
“From a top-down perspective,” Lystad said, “Cloudability makes it much easier to identify opportunities to act on.”
Cloudability is central to Visma’s financial and operational processes. The tool’s ability to provide detailed insights on resource utilization, reserved instance opportunities, and idle resources enables more informed decision-making, resulting in smarter financial commitments and reduced wasteful spending. The central FinOps team actively utilizes these insights to target their individual subsidiaries.
Enabled by Cloudability, they run targeted, structured workshops for each subsidiary and have achieved an average of 15% cost savings per participating subsidiary in the past year. “We have much higher coverage in terms of reserved capacity and instances today than what we did three or four years ago,” Lystad said. “We can credit Cloudability a lot for that.”
With 180 autonomous companies (and growing), getting teams to work cohesively in optimizing cloud costs was a constant challenge. But Cloudability helped simplify this process by reducing the time and effort required to consolidate and interpret cloud usage data, enabling more efficient and productive cost management discussions across teams.
“Cloudability helps our teams get a quicker overview of their costs, especially in multi-cloud situations,” Lystad said.
In addition, Cloudability’s intuitive dashboards made financial data more accessible to diverse stakeholders from a single platform. This, combined with the company’s strong commitment and organized approach to FinOps has enhanced cross-functional collaboration, involving financial teams directly in cloud management discussions and creating a shared culture of responsibility.
Lystad said, “Cloudability has helped us bridge the gap between technical, financial, and business stakeholders when it comes to cloud costs.”
Lystad added that sustainability is a big part of Visma’s mission. The company is heavily invested in working with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and each of these providers supply dashboard metrics on data center performance, including carbon footprint.
Cloudability’s rich sustainability dashboard has enabled Visma to successfully integrate these metrics into its FinOps practice, making it easy to aggregate and analyze carbon emission data in tandem with their cost and utilization metrics. This initiative reinforces the company’s commitment to environmental responsibility as it develops new software products.
Moving forward, Visma continues to seek improvements in its FinOps and sustainability initiatives, as well as how to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into the organization. With the anticipated expansion of AI across its product and operational workflows, Visma aims to utilize Cloudability to accurately track the carbon impact of AI workloads and further position the company as a leader in responsible and cost-effective cloud management.
Reflecting on their journey so far, Lystad emphasizes the importance of clear ownership for FinOps, defined objectives for cost optimization, and a strong community-driven approach to ensuring ongoing success. With Cloudability deeply integrated into its operational framework, Visma confidently manages its cloud investments, achieving tangible financial, operational, and environmental outcomes.
