Podcast

Ep 39 – Hacking Cloud Costs

April 19, 2022

This week’s guest

Michael Kearns

Chief Executive Officer Virtasant

The hyperscalers make thousands of product and service announcements each year. (Yes, THOUSANDS! We looked it up.) It’s almost impossible to keep up, much less pinpoint the ones that can help your workloads run more efficiently and reduce cloud costs. Fortunately, there are resources out there that can help.

In this episode, I talk with Michael Kearns, founder and CEO of Virtasant, a company that specializes in hacking cloud costs. His team helps businesses save millions and millions of dollars by optimizing their cloud spend.

Listen to our conversation about:

Why the increased pace of innovation that the public cloud makes possible is a double-edged sword [03:46];
How understanding an organization as a whole is critical to controlling cloud costs [05:56];
Why Virtasant chooses to be different by offering a pay-by-results pricing model [10:00];
The biggest mistakes companies make with their cloud environments [11:39];
How many billions of dollars in potential savings are waiting in the wings [16:05].

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Read more about Virtasant and follow Virtasant on Twitter
Read my blog about how to keep cloud costs under control, or reel them back in if they get away from you
Listen to episode 31 of Telco in 20 with Verizon’s Nanda Kumar. Check out the 8-minute mark to hear our conversation about how the public cloud shifts the buying power in an organization, and how to work with the finance team to manage cloud costs.
Check out The Keys to AWS Optimization with Jeff Barr
Take a look at the 2021 archive of AWS product and service announcements – all 2,080 of them!
Also interested in body hacks? Check out Levels, the continuous glucose monitoring system
Moving to the public cloud can feel like a money pit, but it shouldn’t. Here’s a “behind the scenes” video of the 1987 movie The Money Pit to make you laugh, and if you feel like you’re identifying with it a little too much, give me a call and I’ll get your spend pointed in the right direction.

Author’s bio

Michael has built and led many high-growth businesses, including Virtasant, Toptal Enterprise, and Slalom. He has also served in executive roles at ThoughtWorks and Accenture. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and his MBA from the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business. Much of his time is spent finding new ways to distribute opportunity more evenly throughout the world and unlocking the potential and power of geographically distributed teams.

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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.

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