“Apptio Cloudability was different from other tools because of its user experience and multi-cloud capabilities. Koch Business Solutions Cloud Platform Leader.
Background
Koch Industries, Inc. (KII), is an American multinational corporation based out of Wichita, Kansas. 130,000 employees are employed in 70 countries by the company, with approximately half of its business in America. Forbes estimates that Koch Business Solutions Industries is the U.S.’s largest private company with an annual revenue of $110 billion.
Koch Global Services (Koch), which is part of Koch Industries, provides shared services to the entire enterprise. They oversee security and governance, as well as driving all major IT initiatives in the subsidiary companies.
The Challenge
Move to Accelerate, then Stay Lean
Koch Global Services (Koch), is an IT global solution provider for koch Industries’ business needs. A strategy for Koch moving to the cloud was created in 2017. The team stated that there was a transformative imperative and that a data center would not provide the opportunity to achieve this transformation. Koch had to accelerate innovation.
Koch business solutions Cloud Platform Leader said, “We knew there was an opportunity to leverage technology.” “So we asked ourselves, “How can we make it happen and how efficient can we do it?”
The Solution
The team became more comfortable with cost visibility and realized that more detail was needed. It would have been difficult to create a solution that accurately bills Koch’s multi-cloud architecture.
Koch Cloud Platform leader said that Apptio Cloudability’s user interface and multi-cloud capabilities set it apart from other tools. Onboarding customers’ environments was very easy.
Apptio Cloudability’s Account Mappings and views allowed Koch to organize its spending by business. This enabled Koch to create global filters on cloud data and allow each business to only view its spend. This level of efficiency and security was crucial to gain the support of Koch’s subsidiaries businesses and successful rollout of the platform. Businesses saw the value in having access to their costs data and asked for additional ways to view their resources. Businesses were able to see their resources in additional views by key business lines or product owners.
The platform was made available to all koch business solutions. This allowed the implementation teams to adopt best practices, integrate cloud hygiene tasks, and turn off stale resources. The Cloud Optimization Team was initially composed of two full-time experts: a Koch Cloud Optimization Engineer, and a Koch Cloud Platform Producer Owner. Koch’s Finance team was then added. They continued to progress with a member of the finance team who is dedicated to cloud cost management.