Bringing FinOps to MSPs and their customers

Ask those responsible in your company for collecting and aggregating cloud cost and usage data, and they will tell you that it is a tedious and error-prone job. Having C-Facts take care of that saves you hours and perhaps days of work every month.

Yes, there are multiple ways that C-Facts helps you to reduce your 30% cloud waist:

• Data collection: 
• No need for hours or days collecting and aggregating cloud usage and cost data
• Customer support: 
• By providing your customers insight into their cloud usage and cost, you reduce the number of usage- and cost-related questions from your customers
• You will be able to answer cloud usage and cost-related question from your customer much more efficiently
• Reduce waste:
• By having an overview of all your cloud costs, including those cloud costs not assigned to customers, you prevent loss of turnover

Yes, C-Facts enables you to deliver an added-value cloud cost insight service to your customers. How you deliver that service and what you charge for it is up to you.

C-Facts is the perfect new business enabler as cloud cost management is on the agenda of more and more companies. You will also find that cloud cost management is often driven by different actors than your regular CTO contact; it is a finance and business-driven need. This enables you to talk to a broader set of shareholders at your prospects and customers; 

• You can start by offering C-Facts without the customer changing cloud supplier, providing insight into their cloud spend with a low impact first step while creating high stickiness and customer satisfaction. 
• With that service and relationship in place, you can convince the customer to acquire the cloud services from your company.
• C-Facts can connect to both the current and future cloud data source making the transition easy for you and the customer.

No, with C-Facts being a SaaS solution with a straightforward process for connecting your cloud accounts, you can be up and running in just two days.

C-Facts supports any API enabled data source. We currently have API connectors available for:

• AWS
• Google Cloud
• Azure
• Office 365 and Microsoft 365
• Oracle

Yes, you can connect as many accounts you want, accounts from the same cloud or accounts from different clouds.

The C-Facts service is Hosted in AWS Frankfurt.

Advice on possible savings is in the scope of C-Facts and will be developed in the near future, after which your managed services team can determine whether to implement the advice.

Automated savings would require C-Facts to create cloud-specific integrations; this would contradict the goal of C-Facts to provide you with a source agnostic cloud cost management solution.

Yes, you can set budgets and alerts. You first set a budget and then set (multiple) percentage-based alerts. You can set per alert which persons need to be alerted.

Yes, this is one of C-Facts’ main functionalities: sharing cost and usage data with the applicable shareholders/customer. Your customer gets access to his C-Facts Cloud Cost Management dashboard that he can configure at his will.

Yes, with the data you have provided, the customer can create dashboards to fulfil his specific needs for insights into his cloud costs and usage.

Yes, C-Facts enables you to set a granular discount policy based on the cloud’s retail price. This then provides your customer with an accurate cost overview.

You can use the upload functionality to import your on-premise cost and usage data.

C-Facts can be used for small, medium and enterprise customers.

SMB

When offered to small and medium-sized customers, efficiency is often the driver. C-Facts enables you to provide these customers insight into their cloud spend without effort from your side. It also creates stickiness and increases customer satisfaction.

Enterprise

With their significant cloud spend, across multiple clouds, used by different departments, enterprise customers will take full advantage of the C-Facts percentage-based cost allocation, create customer-specific dashboards, and cross charge to cost centers like departments. 

And you can provide this as a managed service that could also involve helping your customer with the correct tagging of cloud resources, further enhancing his cloud cost insights.

We have two options, an MSP model and an Enterprise model.

The MSP model enables you to sell C-Facts to all your customers at a very competitive rate.

You can also resell the Enterprise license specific for one customer while we provide you with a healthy margin.

C-Facts has a channel first approach to the market. If we ever target the same prospect, we will set up a joint effort to win the prospect and have you in the lead at the specific customer.

Yes, you can. This is the perfect opportunity to get a first foothold at the customer. C-Facts can connect to Public Cloud accounts independently of how they are set up. The only restriction is getting the correct credentials from the customer.

We see that most MSPs have a billing solution that provides the correct billing items but lacks the ability to offer the insights needed by your customers. That is why we have chosen not to create a billing engine. Instead, C-Facts can provide your current billing system with the necessary input for correctly billing your customers. 

This ensures that both systems do what they do best, C-Facts by providing in-depth Cloud Cost Insights, and your billing system can focus on aggregating billing line items from different sources (IaaS, Managed Services, Consultancy and C-Facts).

With C-Facts being a Cloud Cost Management tool, we are often put in the same bracket as tools like:

• Apptio
• Densify
• CloudHealth
• CloudCheckr
• Flexera
• Nutanix XI Beam

All these companies have successfully delivered Enterprise customers an operations/technical focused Cloud Cost Management tool. A tool that requires lengthy implementation projects with consultants and training of employees. 

Many of them haven’t been successful at supporting the full Cloud Ecosystem, including MSPs and Resellers. 

That’s where C-Facts accelerates. C-Facts enables all the actors in the cloud Ekco system to deliver added-value cloud cost management services with an easy to implement SaaS offering.

C-Facts customers need to get a grip on their significant cloud costs, preferably from a business perspective. This need increases the higher the monthly costs are and when they increase/change month on month. 

The challenge to get the insights needed increases when the customer:

• Uses multiple public clouds,
• Uses multiple accounts in the public cloud, 
• Has subsidiaries and departments to which he needs to allocate cost,
• Needs to provide subsidiaries and departmental specific dashboards.
• Needs to allocate shared resources,
• Has a merger and acquisitions strategy and needs an aggregated view of cloud costs consumed by different companies. 

Quote from customer:

The use of Public Cloud has grown organically. Our development departments have created multiple Public Cloud accounts in different Clouds of their own accord. We lack an overview of costs and cannot allocate the cost to the appropriate cost centers. We only know that our monthly costs are rising to a level that our board of directors is demanding an accurate report.

We are now in the process of centralizing the reporting of Cloud Cost and Usage and have started to implement a tagging framework to allocate costs better. 

The more a customer ticks the above boxes, the more he becomes the ideal C-Facts customer.