Cost savings plus client satisfaction equals success for The Instillery Cloud Calculator

The Instillery is an award-winning Kiwi company born in the cloud and automation era.

Since inception on the 4th of July 2013 The Instillery had just two full-time staff members. Five years, two acquisitions and over 200 enterprise class public cloud migrations later; The Instillery is a global operation, with their head office in Auckland, and a full-time team of 107 employees.

Jeremy Nees, The Instillery’s Chief Product Officer, describes the ambitious kiwi startup’s unique proposition. “Cloud IS our business. We’re not an ICT business with a cloud practice or department Every waking hour, our entire team is focused on accelerating our clients’ cloud adoption journeys to enable them to reap the well-documented benefits.”

Indeed, ‘the cloud’ has long been taunted as the go-to technology for achieving cost savings. Yet there are many factors to consider when planning the move to the cloud. Which provider to choose? How to manage workloads? What commercial models are available? And just how much money can the business save?

“Organisations are increasingly wanting to understand the cost of cloud and potential savings available to their business,” comments Nees.

True to their ethos of innovation, improvement and delivering tangible outcomes, The Instillery took the bull by the horns and devised the answer to this question of cost savings: delivered through The Instillery’s Cloud Cost Savings Calculator shown in Figure 1.

Drawing on deep, multi-cloud business intelligence, real world migration experience and big data capability, The Instillery Cloud Calculator models a customers environments in a matrix of scenarios, incorporating external data sources, combined with contextual business information captured during The Instillery’s FastPath Cloud Discovery assessment.

“We have some great tools available to collect real-time data on customer environments, whether on premise, IaaS or in the cloud,” says Nees. “Our Cloud Calculator takes this data to the next level, providing an organisation with predictability within a margin of error of less than 5% about what their public cloud costs will be.”

Powered by Microsoft Azure, Flow and Power BI technology, The Instillery Cloud Calculator is an extremely powerful and dynamic data tool, supporting strategic decision making with real-time insights. These give organisations the intelligence and confidence they need to advance. Take one of the Instillery’s recent clients Auckland Council for example.

Finding better ways to manage a city

Auckland Council serves more than 1.6 million people, and receives masses of data from across its transport network, water network and many more. All of this information needs to be analysed in order to make clear decisions about managing and developing Auckland’s infrastructure. Traditionally, this process has been lengthy and complex.

“The challenge in Auckland is pace and scale,” says Dr. Haydn Read, Head of Infrastructure Programmes, (DPO), Auckland Council. “If we didn’t go into the cloud, our biggest servers would grind to a halt.

“With the architecture The Instillery provided for us, we’ve been able to run analytics significantly faster, and in new, dynamic ways. It’s a whole new way of managing the city.”
Auckland Council’s Performance and Capacity Manager (now Cloud and Infrastructure Manager at Vector), Sean Kemball, commented. “A very compelling component of the feasibility engagement at both Auckland Council and now Vector was The Instillery Cloud Calculator.

“It provides exact cost comparisons by workload for the major cloud providers, their discrete consumption models as well as migration options ranging from lift and shift to transformation options including Platform as a Service. This very effectively showed the possible savings we could realise by moving each application to the public cloud.”

Kiwi enterprises are now saving up to 55%

The dynamic Instillery Cloud Calculator has transformed The Instillery’s ability to deliver concurrent client engagements faster than ever, and at a lower cost.

Based on over 100 successful cloud migrations, enterprises throughout New Zealand can generally expect to save between 28 – 55% through the mass adoption of public cloud.

“That’s before any application of extended Reserved Instance Opportunities such as Azure’s 3 Year RI, exciting new consumption models such as Hybrid Use benefits from Microsoft, or even Time of Day resource automation.” Concludes Grant Baty, The Instillery’s Principal

As well as accelerating their ability to realise savings sooner, The Instillery’s clients need invest less on traditional “tier 1” white glove consultants for cloud assessment. This allows more focus on establishing true cloud foundations, including SD-WAN + Security Architecture, while migrating production workloads to the cloud.

What’s next for the Cloud Savings Calculator?

In production since 2017, The Instillery’s Cloud Calculator is accelerating through its product development cycle – with some cool new features including:

Hybrid Performance Benchmarking: Understanding the performance profile of compute, storage, and network resources in on-premise and private clouds. Analysis of public cloud costs vs a myriad of traditional local options including both private IaaS and All of Government IaaS pricebooks in addition to on premise depreciated cost models such as HPE Greenlake.

Machine Learning: An intriguing new capability from Power BI Desktop that allows clients to quickly gain competitive intelligence and pricing information using a “Get Data from Web” function. Once the data is ‘scraped’ the myriad of Query Editor capabilities shapes the data and surfaces timely insights.

Auto updates on Pricing Plans: Delivering additional cost savings by determining the ideal pricing packages based on the usage profile.

AI-driven Planning and Forecasting: The ability to run “what if?” scenarios by changing regions, pricing plans, discounting levels, instance types, instance families, and performance thresholds to achieve right-size, based on the performance target.

Exportable Reports: Downloadable TCO reports based on various mapping options, and exportable graphs and charts as images and spreadsheets.

The invention of The Instillery Cloud Calculator has given the world’s enterprises unparalleled insights into their public cloud futures. With its thirst for innovation and a cloud agnostic, data-driven approach, The Instillery continues to drive efficiencies, enhance client experiences and accelerate measurable business outcomes for clients and strategic partners such as Microsoft.

Connect your business with a trusted Microsoft solution provider

To take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud, get in touch with one of our trusted Microsoft solution providers. Specialising in delivering bespoke Microsoft-based technology, a certified solution provider will assess your business goals and identify strategies that save costs, achieve greater agility and open up new opportunities. Let’s start the conversation about your cloud future, here.