Roi Ravhon is the CEO and Co-founder of Finout, a cloud cost management platform that uses AI to help businesses optimize their cloud spend. In this VMblog Q&A, we discuss Finout's Cost Optimizer solution, how AI is used to improve cloud cost visibility and control, and the benefits of using Finout for businesses of all sizes.
Ravhon has over 12 years of experience in DevOps and engineering, and he is passionate about helping businesses save money on their cloud costs. He is also a strong advocate for using AI to improve cloud management, and he believes that Finout's Cost Optimizer solution is a powerful tool that can help businesses achieve their cloud cost optimization goals.
VMblog: Finout Cost Optimizer seems too good to be true -- a business simply turns it
on, and then behind the scenes, AI is working to save up to 60% on AWS costs. What's the trick? How does it work?
Roi RavHon: Finout is using a proprietary AI to
automatically buy and sell Reserved
Instances for EC2 on the AWS marketplace. Although it is possible for our
customers to do this manually, it is not very effective -- especially at scale.
VMblog: Are
there any other FinOps solutions leveraging AI in this way? What makes Finout's
approach unique?
RavHon:
There are similar tools that offer this service, but there are two major
advantages with Finout Cost Optimizer. The first is that we do not charge any
savings fees. The second is that AI will also be added to what we call the
MegaBill, which is a consolidation of costs from all cloud providers and 3rd
party SaaS services into a single dashboard, so that companies can optimize
spend for Azure, GCP, Snowflake, and other platforms in the future.
VMblog: How does Finout charge for AI-powered cost optimization? Is it a flat
rate or is it taking a percentage of the cost savings from the customer?
RavHon: Finout doesn't charge anything for the savings we generate
from our optimization tools (competitors in the market often take a 20% cut).
We can do this because we consider cost optimization just one piece of our
broader FinOps platform. We have plenty of other features like FinOps
Dashboards, virtual tagging, cost governance, anomaly detection...
So what we do is charge a flat fee of approximately $0.07 based on cloud
consumption. Let's say a customer has a $5 million cloud spend, we'll
charge them around $35,000 per year, but we'll save them an average of $900,000
(and we won't take any percentage of those savings). In comparison,
competitors would charge around $180,000 for the same savings.
VMblog: According to the press release, Finout is striving to be the
"Datadog of FinOps" -- can you explain what that means? It
seems like an ambitious goal especially for a company as young as Finout.
RavHon: When we say we're the "Datadog of FinOps," we mean
that we're creating a one-stop-shop for all FinOps needs, just like Datadog has
for system observability. Many companies are using 2-5 different tools to meet
all of their FinOps needs, which adds unnecessary complexity and expense.
We currently support the entire FinOps
framework, including all domains and capabilities, and have created custom
and predefined dashboards, as well as anomaly detection features. We also work
with major public clouds such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba, and more. Of
course, there's always more work to be done like adding more integrations and
making our abilities even more comprehensive. That said, Finout Cost Optimizer
filled a crucial gap in our automation capabilities -- we now believe Finout is
the only solution you need.
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