VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth® is a powerful solution to help you visualize, optimize and govern your cloud environment. But not all customers have the in-house resources or expertise required to realize the full benefit of the platform.
As part of our commitment to your continued success, our Customer Success Service grants you exclusive access to a technical account manager (TAM) and a customer success manager (CSM) who will make up your account team.The TAM acts as your primary technical point of contact, a subject matter expert of the VMware Aria Cost product and best practices. The CSM acts as your primary business point of contact, securing alignment of business goals and objectives. Together, your account team will ensure you get the most value out of VMware Aria Cost. The team will review your strategic initiatives and goals, and work in tandem to collaborate on achieving these goals.
| Table 1: Customer Success Service benefits | |
| Structured onboarding and training |
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| Ongoing enablement and technical support |
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| Enhanced product experience |
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Committed to helping you succeed
- 90-day implementation plan
- Cloud environment setup help
- Technical reviews to ensure successful configuration
- 30-, 60- and 90-day check-insto review progress and challenges
- Supplemental services after onboarding for long-term success
Customer responsibility
Designate personnel for key roles
A critical component of your success will also come from the resources you commit from your team. You are responsible for designating a cloud program manager, an executive sponsor, and a technical contact to support implementation.
Cloud program manager
The cloud program manager is a cross-functional individual responsible for the ongoing optimization and governance of the cloud infrastructure. They define and manage automated policies; analyze cost, usage, performance and security across environments; and make recommendations on capacity planning, modeling and forecasting.
Executive sponsor
The executive sponsor is a senior member of your team who owns the business case and has a deep understanding and awareness of how the project will help your organization achieve its goals.
Technical contact
The technical contact is a team member who is involved in the day-to-day operations of the cloud and is usually given administrative privileges in the platform.
Cloud environment setup
You are responsible for setting up your cloud environment and configuring, maintaining and using the VMware Aria Cost platform. Examples from the VMware Aria Cost configuration process include:
- Users/roles
- Perspectives
- Reports/dashboards/subscriptions
- Policies/automation
- Budgets
Platform training
You are responsible for scheduling and participating in platform training. Your TAM will recommend which training modules your team should attend, based on the roles and responsibilities of platform users in your organization.
The Customer Success Service package includes:
- Unlimited access to self-paced videos and live webinars
- Virtual role-based learning paths
- Numerous instructor-led courses (see our training catalog for more details)
- Subscription to expansion webinars
Participate in business reviews
At a minimum of once per year, we will conduct business reviews with the intent to focus on adoption and value realization of VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. The required attendees for this meeting are the cloud program manager, the executive sponsor, and the technical contact(s).
VMware responsibility
In addition to designating your account team and offering training, VMware will also be responsible for the following activities.
Continuous customer enablement
Throughout the life of your VMware Aria Cost subscription, your TAM takes a consultative approach, driving best practices in cloud management strategy and VMware Aria Cost implementation. Your TAM will proactively reach out to your team to identify areas that will make your cloud environment healthy.
Your TAM will also:
- Review the setup of policies for automated governance of your cloud infrastructure
- Deliver advice on implementing cloud best practices around:
–Tagging and infrastructure classification
–Reservation management
–Integration with third-party cloud ecosystem solutions
–Cost optimization through reporting, governance policies, and automation
–Infrastructure rightsizing consultation
Conduct business reviews
Your account team will conduct a business review at least once per year to review the following:
- Configuration status (e.g., newly added accounts/integrations that need to be configured)
- Customer-specific metrics (e.g., adoption metrics, usage metrics, etc.)
- Results and deliverables from the previous 90 days
- Major obstacles to success (and how to get back on track)
- New products or features you might be interested in
- Benchmarking against companies in your vertical with similar cloud spend
- Areas for additional adoption or value realization
- New goals and next steps
Performance benchmarking
We will compare your adoption and cloud management to other similar companies based on vertical and cloud spend. A VMware consultant will work with you to understand how you function as a business, and discuss functional and technical intricacies of how you manage your infrastructure. We will research and leverage anonymized industry data, anonymized VMware Aria Cost information, and best practices to create a benchmark report showing how you compare against your peers. The goal of this service will be to identify opportunities to help guide you toward running an optimal environment based on similar companies
Deliver annual product roadmap
Upon request, our product management team will walk you through a presentation of our roadmap and describe the VMware Aria Cost capabilities and enhancements that will be added in the next several quarters. These sessions are typically 45 minutes in length and are highly interactive. In these sessions, we’ll explore topics relevant to industry needs, common customer challenges, and our approach to solving them.
Early access to private betas
Upon request, our product management team will provide you with access to new features that are still in private beta. In addition to giving you the earliest access to new enhancements, you will also provide the engineering team with input and feedback.
Provide ongoing technical support
As part of our Customer Success Service package, you will have unlimited access to our technical support team, with defined SLAs for first response time based on priority of the ticket. Our results-driven technical support team strives to solve problems in the context of your business goals.
| Table 2: Targeted initial response (within business hours1) | |
| Critical | 1 hour or less |
| Major | 4 hours |
| Minor | 8 hours |
| Cosmetic | 12 hours |
The VMware team committed to your success includes:
- A customer success manager
- A technical account manager
- Customer support
For your success, you are required to designate:
- A cloud program manager
- An executive sponsor
- Technical contact(s)
Technical support includes:
- An unlimited number of support contacts
- Email- and web-based ticket submission
- An online ticketing system for tracking and reporting visibility
- Access to online documentation
- A designated TAM for support escalation
Onboarding
Part of our commitment to your success includes a comprehensive onboarding during your first 90 days using the platform. The VMware Aria Cost onboarding methodology is based on hundreds of successful customer implementations around the world. Our approach focuses on “teaching to fish,” which will empower you to become a platform expert, with the knowledge to administer and use the platform to its fullest potential.
Figure 1: What to expect in your first 90 days.
30-, 60- and 90-day check-ins
Regular check-ins ensure your implementation is on track. Your TAM will review your environment to provide guidance on actions and cost savings opportunities identified within the platform.
30-day check-in
Your account team will check in with the cloud program manager and the executive sponsor on the 30-day mark to make sure the implementation is on track.
60-day check-in
Aside from other ad hoc sessions that may occur, your account team will review implementation progress with the cloud program manager on the 60-day mark once the training has been fully completed. Your TAM will assist in overcoming any potential obstacles and provide assistance to implement any recommendations that the platform generates. In addition, your TAM will point out any potential saving opportunities or areas that may require attention.
90-day check-in
Your account team will conduct the first business review with key stakeholders from your organization at the 90-day mark. During this initial business review, your TAM will review the following:
- Results from the previous 90 days
- Major obstacles to success (and how to get back on track)
- New products or features you might be interested in
- Benchmarking against companies in your vertical with similar cloud spend (upon customer request)
- Areas for additional adoption or value realization
- New goals and next steps
- Closeout of the implementation
Supplemental services
If you require additional assistance, supplemental professional services and training services are available. Supplemental services are not included in the price of the Customer Success Service. Your customer success manager can consult you to determine the best package or ad hoc services needed and provide the associated pricing
VMware Implementation Service for VMware Aria Cost
VMware Professional Services will work with you to consult and configure policies, automations, Perspectives, reports and roles to provide visibility and optimization of your environment, ensuring you have well-categorized information about your assets, spend and usage.
VMware Cloud Governance Service for VMware Aria Cost
VMware Professional Services will work with you to help define, execute and maintain a set of Perspectives and reports that will provide stakeholders in operations, management, engineering and finance with well-categorized information about their assets, spend and usage on a go-forward basis.
VMware Cloud Optimization Service for VMware Aria Cost
VMware Professional Services will provide guidance, recommendations and an action plan for you to execute, including analysis of your VMware Aria Cost environment to identify opportunities to reduce cost and improve efficiency through cost, utilization and optimization analysis.
VMware Billing Rules Service for VMware Aria Cost
This service will transform your costs at a line-item level as we load your data into the VMware Aria Cost platform. These modifications are done as percentages and can be applied at an AWS product and region level as the process runs nightly. This service provides the implementation of the rules as you define, and the addition/removal of services, master accounts or regions for up to one year.
| Table 3: Summary of service activities and deliverables | |
| Service activities2 |
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| Service deliverables3 |
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2. Assumptions: Unless mutually agreed, all services will be provided virtually, in English, during business hours.
3. Deliverables: Any information and work product resulting from the services discussed in this document shall be deemed “results” under the agreement, and VMware hereby assigns to the customer all right, title and interest in and to such results, other than with respect to any background materials. Any reports discussed in this document will be deemed “reports” under the agreement. VMware represents and warrants that all services, reports, results and work product in this document will be provided in a professional, timely manner and conform to the descriptions and specifications in this document or otherwise made available by VMware to the customer.