What strategies do you employ to control costs without hindering innovation?
Intelligent Finance
Utilizing the Cloud for SAP hosting presents significant opportunities for enhanced agility and cost reduction compared to traditional fixed asset hosting. However, one common concern among enterprise customers is the challenge of monitoring and controlling costs effectively. For instance, while allowing a testing team to create test landscapes for patch readiness can greatly enhance agility and potentially save on technical resources, mismanagement of this process can lead to unexpected cost escalations.
Sapsense, supported by the financial analysis and protection capabilities of the Sapsense Cloud Platform (SC/CP), employs a proven approach to mitigate the risk of excessive or non-value-added cost increases, thereby enabling agility while maximizing the benefits of Cloud hosting.
Billing Data Lake:
Once SC/CP is connected to the customer’s Cloud accounts, it collects billing data hourly, which is then stored in a secure and isolated Data Lake by customer reference. This data serves as a foundation for various SC/CP processes, including spend prediction and cross-account cost harvesting, enabling accurate costing for SAP production workloads across primary and disaster recovery accounts.
Financial Control:
While the Cloud offers tremendous opportunities for innovation, managing costs without stifling innovation remains a critical consideration. SC/CP addresses this challenge through various mechanisms:
1. Discount Programs: SC/CP can be configured to support various contract types, from individual payer arrangements to partner resold discount programs. It provides real-time visibility into costs across accounts, along with insights into actual incurred costs and effective savings derived from investment and discount programs offered by Cloud providers.
2. Margin Analysis: SC/CP enables comparison of expected costs with actual costs across areas such as Support and Reseller Margin, ensuring correct account configuration and informing future purchase decisions. It also allows for configurable rollups to understand total liability alongside internal resell or cost allocation.
3. Spend Prediction: SC/CP not only reports on historical spending but also extrapolates future spending trends. It provides insights into current run rates and predicts monthly totals for each account, covering all spend types including Marketplace and general run costs.
4. Executive Involvement: SC/CP offers an intuitive web portal and mobile apps for visualizing current and predicted spend. Spend areas can be configured at various levels of granularity, with each area governed by budgets and access controls. Additionally, spend areas can be augmented with local currency and specific markups as needed.
