Team Satchel

Team Satchel’s mission is to help schools deliver the best learning experience possible on a global scale. They do this by delivering an award-winning learning platform, “Satchel One”, that simplifies and enhances all aspects of the learning process.

All schools are increasingly recognising the importance, and value, of incorporating digital learning tools into their teaching. Team Satchel is perfectly positioned to help schools thrive in both teaching and student learning. Whether that’s in its ability to support distance learning, promote greater parent engagement or help teachers gain a more holistic view of student performance.

Team Satchel partnered with Strategic Blue because they wanted a trusted cloud reseller to drive down their costs so they could focus on the areas most important to them – delivering high-quality EdTech solutions.

Challenge

 Team Satchel leverages the cloud to host its services. This predominantly involves leveraging AWS’ compute services and database solutions.

Team Satchel needed to focus on delivering their solutions to customers, putting time constraints on their ability to manage the financial part of the cloud. This resulted in overspending on AWS and they found that managing cloud costs consumed a lot of their already limited time. They wanted to engage with a cloud reseller to help them reduce costs in the cloud and manage their cloud billing. Eliminating their cloud FinOps burden would allow them to free up much more of their time and empower the team to focus on their existing EdTech solutions and new product releases.

Results

 Thanks to Strategic Blue, Team Satchel has improved their efficiency on AWS, seeing an increase in savings and more optimised workloads. Team Satchel currently has 94% commitment coverage so there is very little eligible resource usage that is not discounted. Strategic Blue is now working with Team Satchel on other avenues to leverage savings, outside of standard commitments.

Team Satchel enjoys not having to worry about their cost optimisation strategy and has significantly reduced the amount of time and energy spent on these areas. Through trusting Strategic Blue to protect their cloud costs, they have been empowered to divert their attention onto other more critical areas, driving the business forward.

As with all our customers, Strategic Blue will continue to work closely with Team Satchel to continue to drive cloud costs down and support their team on all areas of optimisation. With Team Satchel and Strategic Blue already doing such a good job with cloud costs, the next step is to take the partnership to the next level, using our dashboarding and reporting to help drive internal cloud cost accountability, and providing complete data clarity to make agile business decisions.

Solution

 The solution was clear and straightforward. Team Satchel and Strategic Blue partnered in September 2021 and embarked on a journey to make sure that Team Satchel were able to offload the cloud FinOps overhead to Strategic Blue.

Team Satchel’s AWS usage is relatively stable and consistent so Strategic Blue worked closely with the engineering team to put in place bespoke commitments (Reserved Instances or Saving Plans) based on their usage forecast. Strategic Blue’s unique commitments provide deeper discounts and are far more flexible than those you can buy directly from cloud vendors. As such, this helped drive Team Satchel’s costs down significantly and reduced the number of resources being charged at on-demand rates.

As part of Strategic Blue’s ongoing service, the team schedules regular meetings with Team Satchel to discuss and roadmap further potential cost savings opportunities and other relevant programs. These sessions have one goal in mind: making Team Satchel as efficient as possible in the cloud. This has given them complete reassurance that Strategic Blue is looking after both the cost optimization and all the nuances that come with cloud billing.