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Attendees of our recent Calero World webinar, “Extending TEM Best Practices into Additional Cloud-based Subscription Services”, shared a few key insights about how their organizations are adopting cloud services:

• 82% of organizations rely on multiple cloud vendors to provide each facet of their cloud services compared to only 6%. This finding suggests that very few organizations currently have a single vendor supplying their IaaS, SaaS, UCaaS or PaaS services and the trend towards reliance on multiple vendors is growing.
• 72% of organizations indicated they are deploying cloud via a combination of central and decentralized management. Only 6% said they have a fully centralized model, while 12% are unsure of how their organization is managing their cloud deployments.

Interestingly, these statistics have a close correlation to the key findings in the “2019 State of the Cloud Report” published by Flexera in February:

• 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy
• 58% leverage a hybrid framework of cloud services
• 94% leverage public cloud with 72% leveraging private
• The average organization relies on five (5) different cloud service suppliers
• 13% of enterprises spend > $12M annually while 50% spend > $1.2M
• 66% of enterprises have implemented some form of central cloud collaboration team
• PaaS grew 50% from previous year
• Cloud cost management is top concern independent of stage of adoption and deployment

The bottom line is that cloud is now a mainstream source of technology enablement for most organizations. Therefore, IT leaders must move forward in embracing this paradigm shift in order to stay relevant and evolve into effective strategic assets for their respective organizations. IT Leaders need to leverage tools that can provide the unified visibility and holistic control across all of their cloud service providers. Over the next few blogs we will explain how they already have a solid technology and process foundation to build upon.

Defining Actionable Intelligence for Cloud

For several decades TEM leaders have relied on multiple vendors to provide their mobile and landline telecommunication services. They understand that the key to effectively and efficiently managing the relationships across multiple vendors is to architect an information repository that enables holistic, consistent and near-time multi-dimensional visibility and control across all suppliers.  The information architecture needs to serve multiple purposes:

• Streamline the lifecycle management of services
• Facilitate secure role-based access control (RBAC)
• Provide consistent governance on the key variables required to enable actionable insight

Since the term actionable insight is widely used, it’s important to provide some context as it applies to managing cloud expenses. Actionable insight, or as some refer to as actionable intelligence, is the transformation of raw data into a holistic information repository that can be used to enable decisions that help organizations increase operational efficacy and maximize their technology investments.

Collaboration and Data Unification Are Key to An Effective Architecture

IT leaders know that every facet of service delivery and support throughout the entire management lifecycle must be aligned to support these objectives – including negotiating contracts, sourcing, modeling the service catalog, ordering and provisioning, inventory configuration management, processing and paying invoices, disputing charges, tracking usage and even how their help desk resolves incidents. Otherwise the organization will be overwhelmed trying to unify disparate vendor data across multiple vendors by engineering and supporting vendor-specific Extraction, Translation and data Load, (ETL) processes that invariably never support the organization’s ultimate goals for secure role-based actionable intelligence.  By taking the lead, leaders can substantially reduce their reliance on expensive engineering resources and automate most aspects of capturing, transforming and unifying their data. In this manner, they are creating value for the financial owners of their cost centers by helping them optimize their investments in technology.

How Insights into Technology Service Delivery and Support Can Impact Business Strategy

Every IT leader has to manage the two-sided dichotomy which includes exploiting leading edge technology services that can (1) help grow their business while (2) maintaining their existing business services on a limited budget. Many of the legacy services are critical to their business and unfortunately can become more expensive to maintain. Successful IT leaders have been the champions of their organization’s transformation from expensive labor-intensive activities which are error-prone to fully automated environments that provide intuitive guided actionable insight to all levels of their organization.  The journey to seek ever-greater levels of technology cost optimization never ends. Success is achieved through a series of progressive milestones that are illustrated in the diagram below.

Transforming to Strategic Value-Based Optimization

In our next blog, we will provide additional clarification to the transformation process and take a deeper dive into the elements and dependencies of cloud service charges and how they correlate to traditional TEM concepts. To learn more about applying TEM best practices to cloud based services, check o