Leveraging the FinOps FOCUS Schema, Vantage Brings Greater Standardization to Billing Data for Previously Siloed Cloud and SaaS Providers.
Vantage, the leading cloud cost management platform that provides actionable insights for every engineer, today launched support for Custom Providers, designed to give customers more comprehensive visibility into costs and utilization across their entire cloud and SaaS stack. Now, customers can integrate any third-party cloud billing and resource data into the Vantage platform, even from custom systems and providers that do not expose billing APIs. This allows customers to achieve a standardized, single source of truth to manage cloud costs.
Also Read: Ubiq, the Cloud Computing 2.0 Company, Ushers in New Era of Reliability and Data Mobility With Patented Technologies
“We’ve faced challenges getting granular insights from invoices on certain cloud providers due to API limitations or the way we’re billed. This has made it difficult for us to allocate costs accurately across all of our different products, teams, and users,” said Warrick St. Jean, Senior Director, Solution Architecture & Digital Transformation at PBS. “Vantage’s Custom Providers feature will allow us to upload costs from any provider, so that we can centralize visibility alongside other services like AWS while gaining deeper insights into resources by team or departments. This will make it easier to manage chargebacks and allocate resources more efficiently across PBS.”
Businesses today consume software from dozens of vendors, beyond just the primary cloud providers. However, many of these vendors offer limited, non-standardized, or even non-existent billing APIs and usage reports. As a result, many finance teams are forced to rely on custom tracking mechanisms or other tools that are poorly equipped for tracking and allocating spend. With Customer Providers, Vantage customers can achieve standardization and centralized visibility across all cloud providers and SaaS vendors.
“Organizations are increasingly using more third-party services to run their business beyond AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud,” said Ben Schaechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage. “While Vantage natively supports 15 providers, including services like Datadog and Snowflake, there are still a variety of costs from other providers that companies need to manage. This has created serious headaches for both finance teams and engineers, who are often forced to cobble together their own tools or attempt to manage costs across a complex array of spreadsheets.”
Also Read: Top Misconceptions Around Data Operations and Breaking Down the Role of a VP of Data Ops
Vantage’s Custom Providers capability utilizes the FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) format, an open-source specification that is rapidly gaining momentum as the standard format for usage reports. Customers can import costs by uploading a CSV file, either via the Vantage platform or via the Vantage API. This includes both one-time costs, such as licenses, for amortization and allocation purposes, or usage reports, to track ongoing spend.
Schaechter continued, “Support for Custom Providers is making it possible for businesses to bring any cloud provider under management. By using Vantage as a single source of truth, customers can achieve a much more accurate and in-depth view into cloud costs and utilization. It’s our hope that as more vendors embrace the FOCUS schema, businesses will be able to more easily advance their FinOps practice and achieve greater control over their full cloud stack.”
