Cut costs by up to 45%, not flexibility. Pay from your savings.

Our Automate plan provides cost optimization for any AWS service where a Reserved Instance (RI) or Savings Plan (SP) can be purchased. Alongside this, you can use any other AWS services.

AWS has more options to mitigate lock-in risk for EC2, Fargate and Lambda, so we manage these “core services” autonomously. There are fewer options available for other services eligible for commitments like RDS and Opensearch—known as “additional services”—so we'll check any changes with you before getting started.

Yes, absolutely. We've been able to unlock additional savings for every organization we've worked with. How much we could actually save you entirely depends on what you use, how you use it and how well optimized you already are.

We don't just save you money—we also save you time, and gift you with more flexibility. We take the burden of optimizing off of your hands and with no lock-in services or spend you'll be far better equipped to focus on strategic objectives.

Even if you have existing RIs and SPs, our Free Savings Review will bring to life the value, whether it’s saving money, time, or building flexibility.

We aim to maintain a commitment coverage as high as possible, typically between 95 on core services, no matter how your AWS consumption fluctuates.

Often, coverage is used as if it is the only metric that measures how efficient a commitment strategy is—but it is one of a few. It is important to consider other metrics as well:

• Utilization (%): how many cloud usage hours you had where commitments could be applied. The goal here is not necessarily 100%. Each commitment has a different tipping point in utilization where the overall effect switches from positive to negative. Striving only for 100% would mean missing out on some savings potential.
• Wastage ($): the cost associated with commitments where their utilization is so low that it is costing you more than it is saving. This should be minimized wherever possible.
• Discount (%): what saving of the undiscounted (on-demand) rate is being realized.

Our aim is to maximize coverage, utilization and discount % while minimizing wastage. Ultimately the most valuable metric to measure how effective your approach to rate optimization is how much you save overall compared to the undiscounted, on-demand rate.

Our Free Savings Review is quick, simple and secure, and will bring to life what this means for you and your savings.

Our process involves:

● Intense usage monitoring,
● Automated actions to respond to changes, and
● Making use of all available Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitment buying and selling options while staggering commitment end dates.

Learn more here.

We’re so confident in our approach that our fee accounts for both savings and wastage—if we generate wastage it reduces our fee. This is uncapped and we would even provide credits should the wastage exceed the savings in the extremely unlikely event that this occurred.

Forecasting is important but it is limited in it's utility—the past is not always a good predictor of the future. It will not predict any significant changes in your usage as a result of a planned migration or a shutdown of a legacy system, for example. Inevitably, when working off historical data there will be a lag in identifying such a change and acting on them. This lag can introduce temporary inefficiencies.

Our approach however uses your historical data alongside incorporating any insights you give us about future plans that could affect usage. This way, our commitment strategy will be guided by both the past and the future, ensuring you are fully optimized (without the need for forecast information).

You can, but many organizations don't, and we find savings at every organization we review. The reason for this is not tooling (there’s plenty of recommendation engines out there) or choice (you can choose from 26 ways to buy commitments).

Our experience suggests it’s a combination of:

• Time: You have limited time and people with the right skills available to explore and act on recommendations. This is what we do. It’s our dedicated focus and we have the tools to manage it efficiently so that we can take it off your hands.
• Risk: Traditional ways of making commitments need confident forecasting to predict future usage and to avoid wastage. The risk of getting it wrong stops many from taking any action or makes them overly conservative in their commitment management.
• ROI: Savings achieved must be worth the time and money spent achieving them. Any time and resources spent optimizing cloud cost is time not spent leveraging the cloud. The losses from this can be far greater than the savings made.

If self-managed, organizations often end up paying for flexibility they don’t need or taking a simplistic approach that limits future choice.

Rate optimization is simple to outsource and requires no management on your end.

We'll simply take care of rate optimization and manage the entire commitment management process so your team is free to focus elsewhere.

Your teams can use this time and the flexibility we create to focus on other areas of cost optimization (e.g. rightsizing, scheduling, modernization or rearchitecting) or driving your organization forward in other ways that require their specific internal expertise.

Our service is secure and non-intrusive. We require no access to the data within your accounts and you retain independent control of our access. You create the roles we need, and can remove them at any time you wish.

We use an AWS best practice RBAC, IAM and SCP approach to grant access on a non-intrusive, least-privilege basis. Our access is defined in the following templates which create clearly defined roles to serve the following purposes, each for a single, named Strategic Blue account:

• Read data about your payer account: List accounts and their tags, describe cost and usage report definitions and read the S3 bucket that holds those reports (CloudFormation).
• Validate data with Cost Explorer: Used to verify our optimization actions have been correctly applied by AWS, view usage, billing and savings plan information (CloudFormation).
• Commitment-holding account access control: Any Reserved Instances or Savings Plans we purchase to access discounts are registered to “Commitment Holding Accounts” used exclusively by us. We may ask your team to create some AWS accounts under your payer account that will always remain owned by you. We may also ask you to invite additional accounts that will always be owned by us into your organization. For your convenience and transparency, as our customer, your Portal homepage summarizes the commitments in holding accounts you own.
  
  We have admin access to these accounts so that we can buy, exchange and modify Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. If you prefer you can grant a reduced level of access using this (CloudFormation).
• Reserved Instance Marketplace: We can optionally grant our commitment-holding accounts the ability to sell unused Reserved Instances on the AWS RI Marketplace as a further method of improving efficiency if your usage changes (CloudFormation).

 Our business model is centered on maximizing discounts while minimizing unnecessary wastage and our fee accounts for both savings and wastage.

If we take an approach that generates wastage it reduces our fee. This is uncapped, even to the point that we would provide credits should the wastage exceed the savings in the extremely unlikely event that this occurred.

Automate is provided via our Master Business Service Agreement on a 36 month initial term. It is available under English, Delaware or California Law. Under this Agreement we take sole charge of the buying and selling of Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments into dedicated commitment holding AWS accounts. In brief summary:

You:
● Remain under your existing AWS Customer Agreement terms and conditions (or equivalent)
● Provide regular high level usage forecasts (including >5 days notice of any material changes)
● Must meet the Automate Service Plan Qualification Criteria in our Service Description. This description is incorporated into your contract and covers service delivery, deliverables, roles and responsibilities

We:
● Charge a monthly success based fee calculated as a share of the savings from Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
● Reserve a right for early termination if you fail to meet high level forecast requirements should they result in persistent losses
● Have a termination compensation provision for customer default or for customer convenience may withdraw Automate if there is a material change to AWS’ product(s) that means our commitment strategy cannot be supported

Onboarding is quick and light touch.

We will ask your team to create some AWS accounts under any payer account that we will be optimizing. These “commitment holding accounts” will be for our exclusive use and will house any Reserved Instances or Savings Plans we purchase to access discounts. They will generate no cloud usage.

You will own these accounts and any Reserved Instances or Savings Plans purchased within them. You will implement Service Control Policies (SCP's) we provide so that your AWS usage accounts cannot purchase Reserved Instances or create Savings Plans. This ensures there is no duplication of purchasing that could cause wastage as we manage all this for you. We may also make use of similar accounts that we always own.

The use of these accounts makes it possible for us to manage commitments efficiently. It also helps minimize our access to your environment. With clear isolation from your data and usage accounts you can easily and independently audit our activities if required.

No. Onboarding with us will not affect your current AWS invoice process.

You will receive Strategic Blue invoices for the Automate fee before the 7th day of the calendar month. Payment is on 30 day terms with a 1% late fee.

No. We can work alongside any Private Pricing you may have.