Pitfalls of a Cloud Only Deployment – Shunit Kainy
Welcome to the Upstack podcast, an ever evolving conversation on all things digital infrastructure, giving tech leaders food for thought as they push to stay ahead of the technology curve. I'm Alex Cole, and with my cohost and colleague, Greg Moss, we invite you to join us as we talk candidly about the latest technology infrastructure topics. Stay with us. Greg Moss, like, I it's always good to see you. I think I'm contractually obligated to say that when we when we get together.
Speaker 1:Obligated? I thought we were friends. We were very we we are friends. We're we're not only podcast cohosts. We are and colleagues.
Speaker 1:We're we're very much friends. But I find myself anytime I have a question about life, professional world, technology, I'm always coming to you. And I've got a lot of questions about the cloud of all things. And the cloud's been all around us for for decades seemingly, but it's still at the forefront of of my mind, I'm sure of the mind of of many other people. And and I I also find myself just wishing if this could be a a podcast.
Speaker 1:Could this be an episode of our podcast? And wouldn't you know it? It is. Here we are. So let's formally welcome everyone back to another episode of the Upstack podcast.
Speaker 1:I read courtesy of our friends at Gartner, one of the recent forecasts, that spending on public services is expected to grow by nearly 22 this year. That equates to $600,000,000,000 in spend. How much? $600,000,000,000. But in the same breath, the Wall Street Journal reported last year that almost two thirds of technology leaders are not seeing significant return on their investment in the cloud, and therefore, they're looking for more flexibility.
Speaker 1:So spend continues to increase, yet two out of every three technology leader is not seen in ROI.
Speaker 2:I mean, makes a ton of sense to me because this is exactly what we've been seeing for years in the industry. One of our biggest recommendations is hybridization, And that really revolves around a culmination of where you put your application stacks to make sure that you're both economically and technically sound. I think another really important thing is how procurement and technology speak. Right? I think there's a lot, you know, today in the ever changing landscape of technology, you know, how the groups within the organization communicate is critical to their success, and you don't see a lot of that.
Speaker 2:And the larger companies that have large procurement departments and large tech groups tend to not communicate as well, but there's instances that you see them communicate great and the output and the outcomes are phenomenal. Companies will have success if they leverage the full capability of the procurement department. If they're lucky enough to have such a department. Greg, we need
Speaker 1:an expert. You're an expert. I I think I think we need an expert, and we have one. Our guest today, wouldn't you know it, is an IT procurement specialist and expert in cloud, in cloud governance more specifically. So everybody join Greg and I in welcoming Shuneet Kaney to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Shuneet, thank you very much for being here. Allow me to to talk a bit about you before we dive into the the topic at hand. Shuneet, you're the head of global IT procurement for Teva Pharmaceuticals. You're also the co founder of technology procurement Israel. So, again, thank you very much for being here.
Speaker 1:Fortiva, you managed, cloud and data center procurement at Amdocs, Checkpoint Software Technologies, as well as random random logic. I would say based on that CV alone, you are more more than qualified to join us on the Upstack podcast today. So thank you. Thank you again for being here.
Speaker 3:So I had such an intro. I'm really, you know, excited to share some of what I'm encountering.
Speaker 1:You stayed with us through the intro, and for that, you're our absolute hero. But we do have questions. I'd really like to get a sense, just to start things off, of your experience in cloud and cloud procurement more specifically. What are the trends that you're seeing in the adoption of cloud?
Speaker 3:I think when I started looking at cloud procurement, I think it was 2016, ages ago in terms of technology. Then what we were looking was more trying to compare apples to apples, which is kind of impossible when you're talking cloud to data center and trying to figure out the way that procurement looks at things, how much a server cost, a VM cost. It didn't take me too long to understand I'm probably on the wrong track because I spent hours and got to no conclusions at all. Not to say the tears that I shed on on, you know, the frustration of trying to get into some kind of working model. So I think we've weighed past that that most organizations are not expecting to see an apple to apple, apples to apples comparison.
Speaker 3:They, I mean, it's already understood that the cloud has value beyond pricing, but you just touched on this exact point. What is the value? Is it worth it? So we had this cloud first trend, which was not really working for most organizations, I think that were not born to the cloud. So if you are born to the cloud organization, this is one thing.
Speaker 3:But unless you are born to the cloud organization, the cloud first really, I mean, the bills were shocking. And I think there was also this concept of let's try it first and add governance or monitoring or whatever and understand later. So let's dive into those deep waters first. Some drowned, some just wasted a lot of money. And understanding and most
Speaker 1:of
Speaker 3:the bigger companies, I mean, all companies do. They really want to keep being profitable. They had to stop for a second and reevaluate if Cloud First is the right policy for them. And it would be nope for most of the existing and let's say legacy agreements companies. While again, born to the cloud is something completely different.
Speaker 3:If we'll have the time and you like, we can talk about the born to the cloud. But for enterprise and legacy companies, definitely they had to roll back for a second and at least start to discuss governance mechanism.
Speaker 1:I hear cloud first. It's it's well, everyone's in the cloud. We need to be in the cloud, whether it makes sense for the business or not. It's kind of the Greg, I'm hearing hype cycle. Your voice saying hype cycle in the back of my my head as it relates to more recently emerging technologies like AI, which I'm sure we'll touch on deeper into this this episode.
Speaker 1:But I think that sets the stage beautifully, Shuni. And and actually, can can we go there? Can we talk a bit about Born to the Cloud? Sure.
Speaker 3:Wow. Now you got me going really, honestly. I think the amazing part of Born to the Cloud and the very risky part for companies like company that like Amdocs that I worked for is that software companies that has been for a while, existing for a while, they had the advantage of their size. Huge organizations financed, they can really purchase the servers, the resources, whatever they need to start and develop a new software additional capabilities, everything. It really required a lot of resources, really.
Speaker 3:There wasn't at that stage, would say five, ten years ago, mostly ten years ago, unless you had the resources, you couldn't really start going. Now, the cloud changed all this. So when you're born to the cloud, you have an idea. You can really start going and running with your idea, trying it out with very, very little financing and resources, very little. So the risks to the big companies, by the way, and we see today, there are a lot of stars coming from time to time.
Speaker 3:Wow, this is a great app. They're cutting off the traditional ones, which I think is pretty much awesome, but it's risky to be one of those legacy companies. They had to adapt and be agile as well. So companies that are born to the cloud are really from a financial perspective, it made sense to be beyond the cloud. It made sense to see how it goes before you now invest in all sorts of servers and hardware and people and everything.
Speaker 3:So the option to be very, very lean, this is what the cloud allowed them to be. And this is why we see now so many solutions and very niche solutions that maybe in the past we see the biggest companies with many products, and now we see more of niche solutions going from different vendors, and some of them are not that stable when they go out to market. This is also an issue, but this is what the cloud allowed. A company, when you start a product on the cloud, born to the cloud, and you scale up because you're successful, then at some point you need to really reevaluate the architecture and everything because then you understand, I mean, it doesn't necessarily make sense anymore to run on the cloud this agility, flexibility is not something that you need now. Now you need to be cost efficient.
Speaker 3:You need to have some reliability, right, in your resources. Have to have I mean, the in house does have its own advantages. We can I mean, everybody lives cloud there? It It is the advantages, but in house has it as well. It's different parts.
Speaker 3:So I think this is where we see born to the cloud companies. I mean, to hybrid solutions and data centers just because if we talk about it, the way that the cloud vendors selling to us, they're selling basically the reserved instance. What is the reserved instance? My own server, so what's the point in having it on cloud? If I'm already committed, then I'm not really agile.
Speaker 3:I'm not really scalable because I already committed. So at this point, when you get to this stage, then you really need to do the math again.
Speaker 1:Companies born to the cloud, even those companies still can realize significant value in adopting a hybrid approach as you touched on. Totally. Wow. No one is safe. No one is safe.
Speaker 1:It's more difficult for them. Okay.
Speaker 3:It's more difficult for them, of course, because the architecture, you have to rethink a lot of things, right? It's not straightforward at all. Migrating to the cloud is not straightforward either. But still, I mean, they're now maybe did an IPO. Now they're public.
Speaker 3:Now they have a state, you know, stockholders, and they need to deliver the profit. It's every dollar starts to count.
Speaker 1:So whether they have that expertise in house or not, or they can rely on a third party to help architect that hybrid solution, there's options out there. Greg, sorry, you were sane.
Speaker 2:No. Mean, Sunni, you brought up some really great points. I want to challenge you because I feel that once a company has the momentum, right, and they start to put workloads in the cloud, I've noticed that all these widgets and all these little special things that these clouds offer, it becomes very difficult to move or stop or pause. How do you this is where to me procurement comes in with some really great advice. How do you guys work together?
Speaker 2:How do guys coalesce? How do you guys decide? Does procurement play a role in that?
Speaker 3:Procurement has to we need to ask the questions. Okay. So I don't think our role is to make technical decisions. Just not our specialty. It's not what we do.
Speaker 3:But yes, ask questions, challenge all sorts of decision or just give more options. Open up the thought of, okay, so I had a conversation on another topic completely today. Somebody told me, but we always do it this way. Now, when I hear this sentence, it's always done this way. This is where I take a step back.
Speaker 3:I said, okay, but is it right for now? For the situation, I don't really care what we've done for ages. But is it right for now? So a lot of times you fall in love with the process that you implemented. Right?
Speaker 3:And I see it a lot on cloud, off cloud. But somebody had a project, they did it, and it's working for five, seven years, and they're in love with it because it was so successful. It's in their CV because they're so proud of it, and rightly so. But time has passed and now we need to reevaluate. So this is the points where I challenge a bit.
Speaker 3:I ask the question. I think a good, really, really good human person is the one that knows the questions to us. We don't come with a technical solution. It's not our job. It's not our IS on the line either.
Speaker 3:If that is kind of Yeah, honestly.
Speaker 2:But is it your job to challenge them economically? Right?
Speaker 3:Not only by the way, but yes, economically, risk wise. I mean, when you talk about all those super cool cloud solutions for companies like Teva, that a pharma company, high level of privacy that is required under the GDPR parallels and everything. So risks, even if they are not economical or commercial, it's a risk. So we are pretty much those people who would point out the risk or ask the question, did we look at that?
Speaker 1:And is do you see that as the greatest value that procurement provides in this procurement and technology partnership asking the hard questions. You mentioned the budget responsibility isn't yours per se. You're not owning the budget, but you're making sure that the assets being made on behalf of the business is fully fully vetted. So I'm just my mind goes to what is the value of having this procurement resource in the organization?
Speaker 3:So this is one of them, and the other one is the bird's eye point So the option and the ability to consolidate, because I mean, especially enterprises are very, very, very segmented, very segmented. This is a function, the procurement is a function that really sees everything and has the opportunity then to consolidate. And by the way, when we are talking about cloud agreements, it's super important. You cannot be cost efficient without consolidation, without looking at the entire usage of the company. What does it mean?
Speaker 3:And here is another point which is very, very difficult to tackle, by the way. In some companies, IT are just a cost unit and the business has their own P and L. Now that's harming the potential of having really good agreements, not only agreements, but the platforms and things that can run the business much better. Why? Because budget is segmented in different business units.
Speaker 3:The IT is considered just the cost. So they cannot invest in improving the harmonization of the IT. They don't have the funds for it because nobody's looking from that perspective. So strong procurement would do that. Would say, hey, I want your attention business.
Speaker 3:It's true. This is only your budget. But still as a company, and this is where I can use my connections and my relationships with the CPO and CFO, right? With the CFO, I'm saying. This is by the way the person I'm annoying.
Speaker 3:But when I'm annoyed and nobody's noticing my annoyance, then I'm going to the CFO and saying, because I know they care about the bottom line. So if I need to get anything moving and it doesn't move, this is the person I want to really get their attention.
Speaker 1:From cost center to value driver, I love that. Shuneet, in the upfront where highlighting your credentials and your experience, I mentioned that you're an expert, obviously, in the cloud, cloud governance specifically. So when it comes to implementation, companies moving to the cloud or they're cloud first, How often have you found that worse corrections are needed? What are the guardrails that need to be set beforehand? Because clearly in your role as procurement, you are asking those hard questions, making sure every rock is overturned before a decision is made and a budget is allocated.
Speaker 1:But you do the thing and, oh, can we iterate? And what rule, guardrails, guidance, policies are usually put in place? What are best practices there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I would say definitely we need to even if everything was it's a perfect world and the company has started the Cloud Center of Excellence before going to the cloud, and really everybody, security and IT architecture and procurement and finance were all involved in the process of setting those guardrails. We can talk about it further if you want, but just for a second. So even if it was implemented, there are changes all the time. So even if I'm as a company was perfect, still the cloud vendors, they are still changing the rules all the time.
Speaker 3:All the time. They're changing the rules of reserved instance, saving plan, marketplace. Those rules are changing all the time. The reinvent just closed up last week. Unfortunately, wasn't there, but there are thousands of announcements in one week, thousands of announcements.
Speaker 3:Each of those announcements has the potential to be a game changer financially. So you really need to pay attention because it's just it's moving all the time.
Speaker 2:How do you that's a really good point because there's hundreds of new products hitting the market every month. And how do you weed your way through all of that to determine what has value, what doesn't? Because you could probably spend forty hours a week just doing that, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, I mean, I'm looking at my narrow point of view. I'm looking at what has changed in the marketplace reserved and since saving plan, commercial plans basically. And I need to trust the technical, the IT leads that they will look at whatever is new in their domain. It's very, very also important to understand what is the type of your company.
Speaker 3:Okay. So Teva is a legacy company. It's a company that exists for 120 years old. 120 years. So some of the IT is 50 years old.
Speaker 3:No joking. I mean, it's a legacy, legacy, legacy. And you need to understand also the pace that your company is going at. And there's no point in even trying to push things like that because those companies are not able to keep up with the space. So it's very, very dependent on what's the type of the company and the agility and the needs also.
Speaker 3:Right? Because Teva is a manufacturing company. Not everything is very relevant or really would make a huge difference. But, yeah, it's it's that's why I encourage, by the way, I encourage to go to those to these summits and everything and get everything in one because it's like you said, you can drown in them. You can absolutely drown.
Speaker 3:And I think partners are really, really important. So third parties and partners that would really help you to go through all the new data.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a great point. You know, I see a lot of value coming out of third parties when it relates to this because if they're spending their time doing the research and they're kind of bringing you only the cream of the crop, right, there's definitely value in that time saving.
Speaker 3:And if you have a strong partnership trust, then I would trust you as my partner to bring me the information that is really relevant to me.
Speaker 2:So, Shuneet, I know you have both experience in cloud and data center. And this is one of my favorite topics because I'm a big advocate of hybrid, and you having both the cloud and data center experience on the procurement side, I see value in both, right? I'm curious to hear from you in industry how much you hear of companies taking workloads out of the cloud these days back into traditional data center, not entirely, right, but partially. How many companies are still trying to go pure cloud?
Speaker 3:I think it's like a tug war. We always hear about back and forth, and the cloud vendors are really, really trying to fight data centers, so they come up also all the time with new ideas. And if you take for example, Oracle, right? So they have created this way to incentivize their customers to go on into the Oracle Cloud, which is doesn't make any sense. But they still had thought a lot of time.
Speaker 3:They really thought it out and they found a way to incentivize some of their customers and they do it. So I think it's changing all the time. So we see the cost of data storage basically, that this is an issue that it's I see a lot of it on still remaining or moving back to data centers because it needs to be thought out very, very well if you're moving to the cloud, both on the volume of the data, but also the data transfer, all the rates, everything that is included because nobody's talking about it. Yes. To us, it's not always.
Speaker 3:Not always. Not always. We have to really be really look at it closely. However, on the other hand, I can tell you a very, very traditional use case would be the tapes. Right?
Speaker 3:You remember that there still exist. This is like the most obvious go to cloud use case, really. Because whoever ever tried to extract the data from a tape knows it would take you three days and usually would be unsuccessful, 400, at least not 100% of it and sometimes fail completely. So this is like a use case that's the same. It's a no brainer.
Speaker 3:Go to the cloud, please. Really, honestly, please. But when you have those people in the company's twenty years, they do the same. They do the storage and everything. They don't want to let go of the-
Speaker 2:Reaches of habit. Reaches of habit. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So not everything storage definitely belongs on prem, on data centers. I think it's really We need to look everything. You can't really say everything cloud is bad or too expensive or everything cloud is awesome. No, somewhere in between and it's really where is your company's going? What's your ability to self sustain your data centers?
Speaker 3:Because this is also an issue. So if you are outsourcing things, then you need to really think about it. Where it best outsourced. No. Always the cloud by the way again.
Speaker 1:Cloud is not always the answer. Know, you touched touched on some really you crystallized some some key reasons a company might consider a move out of the cloud. Curious from a just general trend standpoint, is your team are you receiving more requests internally to migrate from the cloud? Are you seeing more broadly in your other work companies looking to to move out and maybe land on a more hybrid approach?
Speaker 3:I think what I see the most is the realization that it costs more. Basically, why does it cost more? Because the minute you try to migrate from the data center to the cloud, it takes you a long, long time, if at all, you terminate the data center usage at all. So usually you keep the data center because it takes time, because not all use cases has value on the cloud, but then you're staying with the data center infrastructure and the cloud. So at this point, I think it takes about two, three years at least for companies to realize they are not saving any money.
Speaker 3:And then they start to
Speaker 1:Two to three years? Yes,
Speaker 2:Alex. Two to three years. Sticker shock. Yep.
Speaker 3:You agree with me, right, Greg? This is the time you take.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You hit the nail right on the head, Shanit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I shouldn't be surprised. I should wow. Two to three years. Okay.
Speaker 2:You got to stop storing your pictures in Google Photos, Alex. The thought that you're going to find out in a couple of years, the cost is going to go up.
Speaker 1:What? The digital lives of my children. We've we've lasted this long without talking about AI. I think it it's only time. It's only time because it's it's in the headlines every day with an industry and more more broadly.
Speaker 1:I have to imagine AI is coming up in in these cloud conversations. Again, internally, but more broadly as well. I mean, we we see it too. We got to be in the cloud. Let's go to the cloud.
Speaker 1:It's got to we got to be we need to adopt AI just like in the past, even currently, have to be in the cloud. It's it's the the Greg Moss hype cycle, the rush. You got to be on to the latest thing. Does it make sense for your business? So should could you get into know that.
Speaker 1:The cost
Speaker 2:Before you dig in, I want to just add to Alex's thought around AI so you have some context, and I'm very, very curious to hear what you have to say about this. You know, these cloud companies, let's just call it the big three, right? The AWS, GCP and Azure notorious for giving out all these wonderful free credits, right? It's not free, right? It comes back at some point, and this is how they get you on board.
Speaker 2:Then their goal as an organization is to grow that revenue, and how do you grow that revenue? Right? When something steady state, something cool like AI, right? So I'm assuming there's a they're trying to propose a value for these new AI functions, right, for organizations, larger language models, what they to be. How is procurement interpreting this?
Speaker 2:Right? And is it something that's justified, not justified?
Speaker 3:I want to say something before we talk about AI because you mentioned something that is super important, this, the increased ARR. This is the name of the game, right? Not only for cloud vendors, also for SaaS vendors, are kind of cloud, but not software companies are now SaaS, and they want to increase the ARR. This is the important thing. This is why we are losing companies like Teva and others are losing the agility that we are supposed to have because they are now incentivizing us into commitment where, guess what I lost?
Speaker 3:I lost my agility, the scalability, I lost all of this. So it's a problem. And worse than that, or better than that, or moreover, What we are seeing right now after especially the AWS re:Invent that was announced about the marketplace and we can see it also as a trend for, I think, or five years. The marketplace is getting bigger and bigger. What does it mean actually?
Speaker 3:It means that the software resellers are going to lose their grip. They are losing their grip slowly but surely. Everything is going to those marketplace. They insatiable. I insatiable has to go on the marketplace in different ways, which by the way, there's also kinda I could say I'm agnostic to it.
Speaker 3:What do I care? I get the software. I don't care. And if I get benefits from the cloud vendor, even better. But it's like you said, it's like you're going into Hansel and Gretel.
Speaker 3:What do you have it in English?
Speaker 1:Sorry. Alcum Gretel. That's it. Alcum Gretel. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nailed it.
Speaker 3:Okay. Into the candy house, and everything is there. Everything is want to fatten you up. Let's fatten you up. And it's now you asked before regarding where's procurement there and the governance and the guardrails.
Speaker 3:So marketplace is definitely, definitely a place that we want to put the guardrails. But even for us, it's very enticing. So this is like, I moved from AI. I'm going back to AI just because you said about the- Agree.
Speaker 2:No, it's good.
Speaker 3:ARR. And it's one of those topics that I'm really worked up about the whole thing. I'm still thinking, what's the trend going to look like for resellers? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Margin. That's margin, right? So if they remove the resellers or the middleman, it allows them to-
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Justify things. Yeah. I agree.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yes. And what does it mean for us? As companies, as procurement? I mean, where's now the added value of those resellers?
Speaker 3:If they have no added value, they would be wiped out. It's interesting conversation. But regarding AI, I think that there was a hype. I think now it's getting into real value. I'm sorry if I'm bursting your bubble, Greg.
Speaker 3:I think the tools that I see now, and it's not like what I've seen a few months ago, it's getting into the domain of real value in the productivity of an employee. And I said, but, I said, but there is this view. I'm not really part of, I don't subscribe to this point of view, by the way. But it's a financial thing. People that are CFOs, finance people, they say, why should I pay 100 ks for this AI tool, which is really, really, really cool?
Speaker 3:I can just increase headcount for less money. They will do the job manually. And this is something that will I think this is at this stage is kind of a barrier for a lot of legacy organizations that do this breakdown or analysis to get into those better productivity tools. But I do see real value in the tools that are coming out now. I don't think they're ready yet fully.
Speaker 3:I think it's still like it will take a few months to a year or so. But their implementation will go wider and wider because it's like, I'm sorry to say, really, I hope I'm not insulting you, Greg, because I love you. You know I love you.
Speaker 2:You couldn't insult me if you wanted to.
Speaker 1:Please, Shanit, proceed. Please proceed.
Speaker 3:It's in a way when you are moving from the Nokia to the smartphone. I'm sorry. But things are at your fingertips in a way that they weren't there before. Now, do you pay more for the phone itself and for a lot of the services? You pay more, but you get so much more.
Speaker 3:And I don't think we're there yet, but that's where the trend is going. And I think a year maybe.
Speaker 2:So I'm all about innovation. I mean, I'm super excited about what AI is bringing to the market. I just want to make sure people out there know that it's shiny, it's new, it's cool, it's expensive. And just make sure that if you're going to implement it into a business model that it's cost justified. Right?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people putting
Speaker 3:in
Speaker 2:the cool things, not realizing or even knowing where that revenue is going to come to support that cost model. So again, just something-
Speaker 3:Now I will strengthen your point. Now I'll be on your side, and I can tell you that a lot of the cool tools are being left behind like the toy of yesterday's toy. You know? You got me my Buzz Lightyear or whatever. I played with it and now I'm bored with it.
Speaker 3:And it happens. I see it all the time, you know, because it's really cool. But if you're not, if it's not, hey, I want this one. I want this one and everything is no. You need to, you know, have a have a make a decision what really brings the value.
Speaker 3:I agree with you on this point that some of those cool, cool tools are not being implemented the whole way through. And then if you go only half way, basically you just wasted money. You bought the tool, you halfway implemented it, you're not really enjoying it or not the entire company. Half the company works with this tool, and then another quarter works with this tool. And there's It doesn't talk to each other.
Speaker 3:So this is an issue that And especially this In young companies, we see proliferation of tools that is like, what's going on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good point. There's application for AI. It's not for every industry. We see clients who benefit significantly from technologies like conversational AI, broader generative AI.
Speaker 1:It's coming. Shanita, I would agree. I love that the the Nokia to the to the smartphone, that that cycle, talk about cycle, is going to only spin faster, and you'll see more businesses be able to benefit from democratization of of AI, but we'll see. Greg's got plenty of other bubbles. We'll we'll work on those.
Speaker 1:Maybe not in this episode, but but another One bubble an episode, Alex. Wait. Let's back to the cloud. Let's let's well, brother, I wanna flip things. We've talked about companies moving from the cloud, maybe establishing a a hybrid solution because it it makes sense strategically and economically for the business.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about moving to the cloud, navigating to the cloud. Do most companies, Shuni, do they have the expertise needed in house to navigate and manage that move?
Speaker 3:Most companies, I think, are supported by third parties. I don't think most companies are doing it on their own. I can tell you that they don't even have enough knowledge to really start a good and supportive cloud center of excellence at first. So, and the problem is really, like I said earlier, that most companies, they wanted to try it out before anything because they want to If it makes sense, then we'll bring in all the governance around it. No.
Speaker 3:Then it's already out of your hands. You have a few accounts. You start playing around with it. And the governance mechanism is not there because you're just tiny, teeny, just the small thing. The small thing is increasing into huge amounts and say, Hey, what happened here?
Speaker 3:So I think, no, at the beginning of any cloud adoption, most companies will not have the resources internally. If they are smart, they will understand that they lack the resources. They will not get into analysis paralysis mode, and they would take a third party to support them. And I really, I encourage IT teams all the time to stop the analysis at certain point, start doing something to contain everything because, Oh no, maybe this vendor, maybe this one, maybe this platform, maybe this platform, they can go on for two years. Yeah?
Speaker 3:Especially in companies that are large companies, enterprises, everybody has, Woah, but we're taking it for long term. So let's think about it. While you're thinking about it, the doors just keep, you know, And the the technology. Right.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Really? Larger enterprises have the expertise? I know earlier stage companies smaller. Everyone's wearing multiple hats.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 3:even Tech companies has the expertise.
Speaker 1:Right. But more broad, non tech I mean, every company. But non tech enterprises, prob probably not.
Speaker 3:Literally. Rarely. You know who are very tech, non tech? It's banks. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Finance world is very, very, very tech oriented, even though it's not their business. Wow. They are really they're on top of it completely.
Speaker 1:They are. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But when they started by the way, they weren't. And that's the thing. And even if you are a tech company, by the way, and the issue with I'm going back to the topic of born to the cloud, the governance is not there. So at some point they will wake up and then they have to herd everything in and it's very, very difficult.
Speaker 1:Megan, I have a question about governance. It's the perfect segue.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Alex. I appreciate that. Know, governance seems to be really important, and I agree with you, Sheen. It's critical. Is it just as critical for smaller companies?
Speaker 2:And what kind of advice could you give to the small to mid sized company that doesn't have the luxury of having procurement teams on their side?
Speaker 3:Okay. So first, yeah, it's important. I mean, it's like now became something that is very familiar. Just first you have to have visibility, monitoring and optimization. And you have to have it at any, even if you have a $100 account, but you are wasting $50 then It's $50 that you could have earned, could have been a profit.
Speaker 3:So I think at any And this is a big realization that from the get go, you need to have those mechanisms in place. And I think everybody talks about phenops all the time, cost saving, and really this is not the only issue. I mean, governance is a big word. I'm specifically not saying phenoms. I'm specifically saying governance because it's so much more than that.
Speaker 3:So if you have an account that is violating privacy in some way, you are risking the company in a big way. So there are so many facets to those governance. Think the team that sets the guardrails of the governance should include finance partners, procurement, and of course, IT security architectures. This is the cloud center of excellence. Definitely.
Speaker 3:If don't have it in house, third party. Yeah. I mean, closing your eyes does not eliminate the problem.
Speaker 2:I agree. I've seen a lot of failure to even just organize and control spend within groups. I know companies that have 40 or 50 people within the organization ordering off of cloud accounts, right? So just kind of being able to control that spider web in itself has value.
Speaker 3:Forty, fifty is not I've seen much more. We have templates and automated self-service ways to start an account, to buy on marketplace, and in a way that it's secure because you have set the parameters, then like a win win. Then for 80% of the cases, you would be covered. You would know that it's monitored well, it's structured well, It's within the way that you secure your company. And of course, from a procurement perspective, the spend is also monitored and budgeted.
Speaker 3:We take a look at it, we trace it. And then for the 20%, then it's a bit of manual work. But I think having 20% manual work rather than, I can't handle it, it's too much, is much better.
Speaker 1:Agreed. Agreed. For the record, everybody, I'm so excited to go home tonight and then tell my family we're establishing our own cloud center of excellence, particularly my my healthiest daughter, Dylan, who keeps recording ten minute, I don't know, TikTok videos on my iPad. We gotta stop doing that, Causing constraints. Shanit, before we let you go, we must learn more about technology procurement Israel.
Speaker 1:I know we talked a bit about it in our our pre call, and this is something that we want more people to know about.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for asking me. It's my baby. I co founded the community about almost two years ago. And I founded the community because as a procurement person that is really a tech person in a way, right? So, procurement and into the cloud, I found that anything procurement is so boring for me.
Speaker 3:It's like everything is supply chain. Everything is heavy and nothing to do with what I do. Now, when I wanted to learn about cloud, then everything is too techie for me because I understand. I understand the principles, but I'm not an IT person. So I found myself that I'm not here and I'm not there.
Speaker 3:And there are so many new products coming all the time. I can't possibly know about everything. And whenever I'm talking to a peer, this is like, really, we can have an hour conversation because it's so interesting. What are you doing here? What are we doing here?
Speaker 3:And just share the knowledge. So starting the community really from this need to have that it's different for tech companies, the procurement is a bit different. We're not looking into supply chain. And really, I couldn't care less about those direct procurement, which is all manufacturing. I'm sorry, but there.
Speaker 3:So really looking at what is interesting for us. And today the community has about 160 members in a WhatsApp group, which is very, very, very dynamic, who are asking every day, where do you buy this? Did you hear about that? What kind of process did you do for P2P, procure to pay? Sorry for being boring.
Speaker 3:Or cloud. Yeah. And by the way, we had, I think, three sessions already. We have quarterly meetings, physical quarterly meetings. When I started the first one, I did only half an hour for mingling and networking, and people came to me, It's not enough.
Speaker 3:It's just not enough. So now we have forty five minutes at the beginning, then we do lunch together at the end, which is another hour, and people are just getting to know each other and really sharing the knowledge. I bring a lot of information and specialists and people to really educate us, a lot of education about AI as well, the way, and cloud AI and negotiations, agreements, things that are boring to everybody else, but interesting for us, by the way. This is exactly that. I mean, this is the place to share the knowledge.
Speaker 3:I'm specifically I don't know. I consider myself to be a very creative person. I find creative solutions. I'm a mediator as well. I love to share all the loopholes that I found in how to make an agreement better or just to say, watch out from this one or to say, hey, look at the reserved instance.
Speaker 3:It's changing in half a year. You should take a look at it. So I think this is really, really valuable for people. We have a lot of people that are leaders in the procurement and high-tech industries. Many of them are women, which we are so happy to see women in the tech industry.
Speaker 2:That's a great thing. Remarkable Yeah. Go ahead, Alex.
Speaker 1:I see it speaks to the power of community, and how that can be beneficial in so many different ways.
Speaker 3:So many different ways. Just an anecdote on women in technology. So whenever I go to the AWF summit and events like that, whenever I go to those events, these are the only times that I go to a public event and there is no line for the women's restroom. There is a long, long line for the men's restroom, No line for the women. This is like my little revenge.
Speaker 3:My small, small, little revenge.
Speaker 2:Got them. I just love it, Shuneet. I mean, I think you're amazing. I think you've brought a lot of value to the industry, to all the companies you've worked for. I think the initiative just speaks wonders, and I'm glad you're doing it.
Speaker 2:We need more of it across the country, and thank you so much for being here. It was a really special opportunity to speak with you.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Shanit. Thank you everyone for listening. This has been another episode of the Upstack Podcast. We will see you next time.
