This is the first article in a series diving deep into the biggest differentiators of our Tangoe One Cloud expense management platform. When comparing Tangoe against other FinOps solution providers, take these items into consideration.
Tangoe One Cloud stands above competitors with the broadest choice and flexibility in cloud cost management tools. This becomes clear when you look at our capabilities in budgeting, cost allocation, and chargebacks. Before I go into that, it helps to first understand the situation and some of the unique challenges FinOps practitioners face in curbing their cloud costs.
Challenges for FinOps Practitioners
Formulaic Software Limits Freedom and FinOps Maturity
Everyone has their own approach to cloud financial management. Because every business buys different cloud services and handles those expenses differently, formulaic FinOps software and rigid systems don’t always yield the big savings and productivity gains everyone is looking for. Instead, companies need extensive flexibility to build their IT budget according to their business practices and control cloud expenses in compliance with their corporate financial rules and systems.
Cloud Cost Management is Hard When Information is Siloed
Few IT departments are sitting on unallocated piles of cash, which means CIOs must restructure their existing budget to make room for new investments. One of the easiest ways to do this is to “pass the buck” — i.e. charge cloud expenses back to the departments that use those services. By holding beneficiaries fiscally responsible, cloud costs are more fairly spread across the business, and IT can loosen its purse strings.
But you can’t see the impact of cloud and FinOps chargebacks on the IT budget when all the key information is managed in separate systems without any integration or unified management strategies.
Budgeting and Cost Allocation Must Work Hand-in-Glove
Advanced FinOps platforms solve this problem. They ensure budgets and chargebacks are all managed uniformly, using the same metadata, tags, and the same financial rules – the rules you establish when you customize your FinOps platform. The FinOps Foundation itself says financial integration is required: “Chargeback is a method to hold business units directly accountable for IT spend and requires IT Finance Integration to allocate spend to the appropriate cost centers and budgets.”
But actually doing this can be difficult, particularly with an in-house program or when using only native tools from cloud service providers. This is where a purpose-built FinOps solution and a fully managed FinOps service like Tangoe’s shines.
Now, let’s talk about how Tangoe One Cloud offers solutions for these challenges.
Tangoe One Cloud: Hyper-Flexible Budgets and Financial Integration
Tangoe provides hyper-flexible budgeting features enabling clients to create, track, and control their cloud expenses on their terms.
CREATE Your Cloud Budget Any Way You Want It
- Budget Customization: Tangoe recognizes that every organization has unique budgeting requirements. Therefore, it allows clients to customize their budgeting parameters based on their specific needs. This means that customers can define their budgeting rules, set spending limits, and allocate funds according to their priorities.
- Multiple Versions of Budgets: Clients want the ability to see their budgets from different viewpoints, and Tangoe delivers on this need with views that slice and dice budget data by cost center, person, or month/year. Overspending reports compare budgets to actual expenses, showing only the deviations or budget-to-actual variances. You can also compare last year’s budget to this year’s to see how it has changed over time.
Reports are tailor made based on how you want to monitor your budget. This is helpful because budgets can be tricky. The overall view might show your spending is on track, meanwhile granular slices of data can reveal areas of overspending.
TRACK Spending, Chargebacks, and Real-Time Insights
- Real-Time Monitoring: Tangoe’s budgeting capabilities provide real-time monitoring of expenses. This means that customers can track their spending patterns, identify any budget deviations, and take proactive measures to stay within their means. Real-time monitoring helps organizations maintain financial discipline and avoid unexpected overspending, making tech spending more predictable.
- Chargebacks and Budgets Work in Sync: Clients can integrate their financial systems and rules with the Tangoe One Cloud platform, making it easy to align FinOps programs with standard corporate financial practices. This way IT Teams are handling all cloud chargebacks the same way their Finance Teams does. Through integration and automation, our platform streamlines accounts payable and general ledger processes. In the end, budgets reflect all cloud chargebacks, showing IT leaders how much room they successfully made in their IT budget.
While most of Tangoe’s competitors tout dashboards that can display budget-to-actual variances, this is considered table stakes. Arguably no other FinOps provider has the ability to streamline cloud financial management the way we do with budgets, chargebacks, and client financial rules all working in one fluid motion. See how a research firm used Tangoe to automate IaaS chargebacks for 500 departments and control costs across three different cloud service providers in just 30 days.
CONTROL Costs with Optimization and Forecasting Made Easy
- Cost Optimization: By having a comprehensive understanding of your cloud budget, clients can identify areas of potential cost savings. Tangoe’s budgeting capabilities help organizations uncover inefficiencies, negotiate better contracts with service providers, and implement strategies to reduce cloud waste and expenses. This can lead to significant savings for businesses with Tangoe delivering 20-40% savings on average.
- Forecasting and Planning: Tangoe’s budgeting tools also offer advanced analytics for powerful forecasting and planning. With these features, clients can analyze past spending patterns, predict future expenses, and plan their budget accordingly. This proactive approach enables organizations to make informed financial decisions and optimize their budget.
Cloud Cost Management Using Unique FinOps Capabilities
Tangoe One Cloud stands differentiated in the market with the ability to:
- Customize budget views and reports, displaying spending data each and every way your stakeholders need it
- Automate cost allocations using your own business budgets and financial rules – you won’t have to adapt your practices to our software
- Ensure that cost allocation and budgets work together under a unified management strategy for advanced FinOps capabilities
Ready for a demonstration of our cloud cost management platform? Contact us.