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2023 Cloud Cost Series (Part 2 of 3): The Top 5 Workloads NOT Well Suited for the Cloud

Preface Thank you for joining us for Part 2 of this 3-Part series on Cloud Costs. Please reference the following 3 blogs to get the complete 2023 Cloud Cost Series: Part 1: Feb 15: Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Part 2: Mar 15: Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud Part 3: Apr 15: Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads Part 2: Top 5 Workloads NOT Well Suited for The Cloud Introduction Since the mid-2000s, clients have been migrating workloads to the cloud with increasing frequency, but recently, we have seen clients start to repatriate previously migrated workloads back on-premises, due in no small part ...

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Debunking Microsoft Series Part 1: FUD Around Bringing Your Own License to Other Cloud Providers

Scott Braden
Mar. 14,2023 | SaaS Microsoft Cloud

This is part 1 of an ongoing series we call ‘Debunking Microsoft’ where we address the ongoing disinformation, half-truths, and mysticism surrounding its own products as it relates to Customer licensing, usage, contracts, terms, pricing, and much more. In part one, we address what we frequently hear from clients; that Microsoft has told them regarding usage of their own licenses in a cloud other than Microsoft's.....words to the effect of “You can’t use your existing Microsoft licenses on non-Microsoft clouds such as Amazon or Google.” Well, that’s not true and Microsoft knows it. This is just one case of Microsoft’s constant and consistent ...

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Cloud Cost Series (Part 1 of 3): Top 5 Price-Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs

Thank you for joining us for this 3-part series on 2023 Cloud Costs, where we explore the Top 5 Price Shock Phenomenons of Cloud Costs, resulting in part from the Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud, and largely emanating from the Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Cloud Workloads back to on-premises: Part 1: Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs Part 2: Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud Part 3: Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads Introduction In today’s installment, we’ll discuss the Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs. Price Shock is a phenomenon that occurs when ...

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Act Now: Splunk FYE - Pitfalls and Opportunities

Splunk fiscal year end is coming up this January 31st and as a result, many deals are set to renew or are aggressively pursued by the sales teams to close as net new business. Splunk is a clever play of words, it is derived from the word “spelunking which means exploring the information of caves. It was developed by Rob Das and Eric Swan in 2003 as a search engine for the log files that are stored in the infrastructure of a system. The main goal of the founders was to market this developing technology in bulk so that it can be deployed in almost all kinds of use cases possible. Splunk went public on April 19th, 2012, with a $17 strike price ...

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Act Now and Stop Overpaying Salesforce: Market Update

Salesforce has led the market for years. We have pointed to Salesforce as the culprit who broke the early promise of software as a service as (SaaS). SaaS was supposed to be elastic with demand allowing costs to go both up and down. Historically, we know that Salesforce is supportive of increases in their customers' cost but it has been punitive to reductions. With Salesforce’s fiscal year-end coming at the end of January 2023, now is a great time to re-evaluate your deployment and at the very least benchmark to see how your spend compares to the market. But first, more on Salesforce themselves…. Things 'they are a changin' in ...

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Snowflake Fiscal Year End January 2023 - Act Now

These days the whole world sometimes feels like a Snowflake… and by that we mean that growth is slowing, and stocks are generally down as reality sets in. Snowflake, the company, is still growing but nowhere near the breakneck speed of the good (?) old days. Macroeconomic factors may be contributing to that, but we believe that, like our clients, the market for Snowflake has figured out that deployments need to be actively managed so that the negotiated costs are not exceeded. Early Snowflake customers learned the hard way that their first agreement would ultimately set the floor for what they would spend, eventually understanding that their ...

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Europe’s Growing Energy Crisis and the Impact to Your Cloud Capacity & Pricing

There is a growing energy crisis in Europe that may have a significant impact on availability and pricing soon for consumers of cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google. With an ongoing war in Ukraine and green energy policies taking effect all over Europe, the pressure on energy has never been greater. And with a supply that could be constricted coupled with growing demand, may equal a business risk for you. The big three customers may take all that on-demand capacity for granted, but those days may be numbered. As French President Macron recently underscored, “We are no longer living in a world of abundance.” Supplies for every ...

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Six More Things You Haven’t Done to Optimize Your Microsoft Costs (why not?)

We know. Making a difference can be tough in IT given the multiple layers of bureaucracy, sacred cows, and politics that is ever present in almost every organization. And of course, there are often sound and practical reasons why change is not a good idea, but what is almost always a good idea, is to at least investigate and plan for change. Only in this way are you actually ready (mentally and physically) to propose and follow through with it. So, as you read through the below items, some may sound familiar and or best practices while others could be a fresh initiative to take on that may get you on the path of significantly lowering your ...

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Act Now: Anaplan Fiscal Year End is January

Introduction Anaplan connects people, data, and plans in real-time in its cloud environment to help customers democratize decision-making across all lines of business and business activities, from strategic to operational levels. Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) As a step beyond traditional business intelligence, Anaplan offers a cloud-based subscription for its Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software — enabling planning, modeling, and collaboration services to power better business decisions and drive better enterprise performance. Anaplan offers a simple interface to its Smart Business Platform, combining connection, ...

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Act Now: Salesforce Fiscal Year End is January

How You Can Win Against an 800-Pound Gorilla Salesforce became the market leader in 2013 and has dominated the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) jungle ever since. With its fiscal year-end in January, now is the best time to review and optimize your Salesforce spend. In the early 2000s, Siebel was the market-leading (and most expensive) CRM (and remained so long after it was acquired by Oracle in 2006 for $5.8 billion), until it lost so much market share that the once unassailable technology goliath finally met its inglorious end. Technically, Siebel is still part of Oracle’s lifetime support policy, but for all practical purposes, it's ...

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