Dexter Siglin

Aug. 31,2021 | SaaS, SSM - Strategic Supplier Management, Digital Transformation

Every IT leader reading this now is overspending 30% to 60% on at least one of their strategic suppliers. Unfortunately, many are overspending on several. How can we know this with such confidence? We’ve been seeing it now since 2002 and it’s the very reason we are thriving today. There are several factors that enable this culture of overspend to get traction inside organizations. Much of it is built on the good intentions of IT buyers simply working to execute their business plans with limited resources. Exacerbating the problem however, are the technology goliaths and their downstream ecosystems, who spend vast sums of money to ensure ...

Philippe Anav

Aug. 30,2021 | SaaS, Cloud, Azure, Amazon, AWS, Savings Cloud, google

Supplier lock-in has been a major issue with savvy decision makers for many years, and with good reason. Allowing your company to be overly subjugated to a specific supplier (often with little control of the situation) often turns into a monopolistic relationship. The script gets flipped and rather than exercising your buyer power, you become the passive party, beholden to any changes in terms and conditions having little power to stop it. Unfortunately, with the exodus from data centers to the cloud, companies are now finding themselves being locked-in to AWS, Azure or Google with their increased need for cloud flexibility and scalability ...

Philippe Anav

Aug. 17,2021 | SaaS, Cloud, Azure, Amazon, AWS, google

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our eighth chapter in the series: Elastic IPs Elastic IPs (‘EIPs’) An Elastic IP is static and is assigned to a given instance regardless of the instance's state. The “elasticity” of the IP address enables you to stop EC2 instances and transfer the IP address to another EC2 instance—or ...

Dave Young

Jul. 28,2021 | Hacking, Managed Services, Supplier Management, Cyber Security, MSP, MSSP

The news is rife lately with security breaches and ransomware attacks. The U.S. company Colonial Pipeline was among one of the high profile cases given the impact on business and consumers across the country. There have been several others such as JBS USA food processor, Ireland’s HSE (Health Service Executive) which manages health care system, Acer and many, many more. As an NBC news item recently put it, Cyber Security staff are barely hanging on and not able to keep up with the barrage of attacks. Its clear that for the short term, the opportunities for criminals to make vast sums of money are simply too good to resist and will likely ...

Matt Ryan

Jul. 27,2021 | SaaS, Oracle, Cloud, Infrastructure

Oracle Rewards! Oracle recently launched a new program selling ocean-front property in Arkansas. Bonus! North of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, they also have land available for purchase. Rewards and Credits! The deal is that for every acre you buy in Alaska, you get a credit toward your Arkansas property! Sounds like a good deal, right? Except however, when you fully understand that Arkansas is not on the ocean, and you have zero need for land in Alaska (no offense meant to Alaskans). Yes, they are not really selling land, but in classic Oracle fashion, they have put together a ‘rewards’ program that purports to lower your support costs but ...

Andrea Alterman

Jul. 27,2021 | HCM, HRMS, UKG, Human Resources

April 1, 2020, Ultimate Software and Kronos merged to create one of the larger players in the HCM market. Six months later, the company rebranded the merged entity to UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group). Now that just over a year has passed since the merger and with direct experience working with our Clients and the combined companies, we thought now would be a good time to assess where the company is in the landscape of HCM solutions, and where you should be encouraged (while exercising caution) in executing agreements going forward. You may also remember them as a 'one to watch' on our Top 10 HCM HRMS suppliers for 2021. Common Threads Unlike many ...

Tjeerd Edelman

Jun. 29,2021 | Software, Financial Services

Back in the 1980’s an established computer company, Applied Computer Techniques or ACT, wanted to crush a young upstart called ‘Apple.’ So, they renamed their computer Apricot. This copycat strategy was not much of a success, Mitsubishi Electronics bought them in the early 1990’s as a competitive domestic play at NEC eventually shutting down the brand altogether. Maybe not the smartest move by ACT. Fast forward 30 years and a young upstart made its way to the market and its consumers. Founded in 2015, Lemonade has grown to become one of the leading InsurTech companies across the world. But how does a fairly young company compete with various ...

Robert Geib

Jun. 28,2021 | Insider, Software, Negotiation, CFO, Cloud

Inflation impacts the cost of nearly all your supplier agreements. Look closely at your IT agreements (especially your Cloud agreements). Even though the cost of technology goes down over time, and technology advancements make processes less manual, less error prone, less expensive, and more automated, many of your agreements still have antiquated clauses allowing your suppliers to *increase* your costs on an annual basis by an amount equal to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) amount, and generally include an accelerator above that amount; something like CPI + 3%, which would provide a contractual right of your supplier to increase your costs ...

Philippe Anav

Jun. 28,2021 | SaaS, Cloud, Azure, Amazon, AWS, google

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our seventh chapter in the series: Use Spot Pricing Spot Instances are spare compute capacity at a steep discount (up to 90%) to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances can go down with very little notice. While they are frequently used to supplement On-Demand Instances, they aren’t meant to ...

Philippe Anav

Jun. 28,2021 | SaaS, Cloud, Azure, Amazon, AWS, google

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our sixth chapter in the series: CloudWatch with Autoscaling AWS CloudWatch (Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring) enables you to collect consumption metrics and set up alarms to invoke actions. These tools collect these metrics, allows you to visualize them and to define alarms with the ...