CASE STUDY Riley Partners with CloudHealth to Drive Cost Optimization and Visibility

$1 Million in Savings

Riley estimates that their customers have in aggregate saved nearly $1M

Strategic Spending

Riley's customers have reduced cloud expenditures and re-invested funds in innovative technologies

Granular Visibility

Providing clients with full visibility into cost savings has positively impacted Riley's customer relations

Riley is an Australian technology company offering digital transformation, data and analytics, and infrastructure modernization tools to help modern businesses thrive. CloudHealth provides Riley’s Managed Services customers with full transparency into their cloud spend and allows the respective teams to act proactively on cost issues.

Riley Faced Challenges with AWS

Riley’s customers, who are predominantly AWS users, were finding the native AWS Console alone wasn’t able to provide the full cloud visibility they needed to understand their cloud costs and usage. To supplement this lack of visibility, Riley had been using a different cloud management platform, aside from the AWS Console, for several years.

The transition to CloudHealth was prompted when Riley’s customers continued to voice their frustration when trying to understand specific service costs at a deeper level. With this feedback in mind, Riley researched the market to find the best solution.

Finding a Solution

Riley pursued a partnership with VMware because of the CloudHealth platform’s ability to break down costs on a granular level and provide visibility into potential cost savings. Stephanie Jean, Customer and Partner Engagement Manager at Riley, explains how her team saw immediate results when working with CloudHealth: “Implementing CloudHeath and giving our customers full visibility into cost savings has greatly helped our customer relationships.”

Riley leverages the CloudHealth Agent, a lightweight monitoring service, to take snapshots at specified intervals and report them to the platform on an hourly basis. The Agent has been valuable for collecting CPU, network, and memory utilization metrics at no additional cost to the customer. Riley has also leveraged the Datadog integration with CloudHealth to enhance the one-stop view for all cloud information.

Other cloud management platforms didn’t offer local support in Australia, making it difficult to resolve issues in a timely manner. Having a local VMware team based in Sydney has been invaluable.

The [VMware] team is always so willing to help. Anytime I reach out to our Technical Account Manager, they always respond quickly and make it a high priority. It’s very refreshing to work with such a responsive team.

— Stephanie Jean, Customer and Partner Engagement Manager, Riley

The Results

CloudHealth’s cost optimization features have become a big selling point for Riley. When CloudHealth was implemented, cost inquiries from customers came to a halt. The cost reports and dashboards made it easy for customers to gain full visibility into their cloud expenditure on their own. Riley is also a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) partner and was pleased with CloudHealth’s visibility across all clouds: “Having one tool that is flexible with its offerings is very important for us. It allows us to have all of the data for our customers in one place.”

CloudHealth has been used extensively to reduce customer costs via the rightsizing and RI functionality. The CloudHealth Health Check Pulse Report gives the Riley team a holistic view of each customer account and allows Riley the chance to quickly identify cost issues and modify underutilized instances.

Riley has also been able to roll out a financial optimization framework, an initiative that wouldn’t have been possible without CloudHealth. Being able to deeply analyze data and craft this framework has given Riley the freedom to invest in other areas of their growing business. Since the inception of the framework, Riley estimates that their customers have in aggregate saved nearly $1M in annual run-rate through the program.

“Through a combination of the analytics capabilities of CloudHealth and Riley’s 10 years of cloud operational knowledge, our shared customers have been enabled to reduce cloud expenditure and re-invest funds toward innovative technology initiatives that support the transformation of their business,” shares Tom Bernadou, Managing Director at Riley.

What's Next for Riley?

Riley’s partnership with VMware has allowed customers to feel confident in their cloud spend and understand all of their costs on a granular level. As Riley continues to leverage CloudHealth’s cost optimization capabilities, the IT team plans to take a deeper dive into the cost dashboards and reporting functionality to drive further cost savings for their customers.

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