Interview: ParkMyCloud Empowers Sysco Foods’ Cloud-Only Strategy

We talked with Kurt Brochu, Senior Manager of the Cloud Enablement Team at Sysco Foods, about how his company has been using ParkMyCloud to empower end users to keep costs in check with the implementation of their cloud-only strategy.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. I know we chatted before at re:Invent, where you gave us some great feedback, and we’re excited to hear more about your use of ParkMyCloud since it rolled out to your other teams.

To get started, can your describe your role at Sysco and what you do?

I’m senior manager here in charge of the cloud enablement team. The focus is on public cloud offerings, where we function as the support tier for the teams that consume those services. I also have ownership of ensuring that cost containment and appropriateness of use is being performed, as well as security and connectivity, network services, authentication, and DNS.

We don’t consider ourselves IT, our department is referred to as Business Technology. Our CTO brought us on 3 or 4 years ago with the expectation that we understand the business needs, wants, and desires, to actually service them as they would need versus passively telling them that their server is up or down.

As well as security and the dev team, teams using cloud also include areas that are customer facing, like sales, or internal, like finance, business reporting, asset management, and the list goes on.

Tell us about your company’s cloud usage.

We’ve had our own private cloud since 2003, offered on-prem. We’ve been in public cloud since 2013. Now, our position has gone from a “cloud-first” to a “cloud-only” strategy in the sense that any new workload that comes along is primarily put in public cloud. We primarily use AWS and are adding workloads to Azure as well.

Talk to me about how cost control fits into your cloud-only strategy. How did you realize there was a problem?

We were seeing around 20% month over month growth in expenditure between our two public clouds. Our budget wasn’t prepared for that type of growth.

We realized that some of the teams that had ability to auto-generate workloads weren’t best managing their resources. There wasn’t an easy way to show the expenses in a visual manner to present them to Sysco, or to give them some means to manage the state of their workloads.

The teams were good at building other pipelines for bringing workloads online but they didn’t have day-to-day capabilities.

How did you discover ParkMyCloud as a solution to your cost control problem?

We first stumbled upon ParkMyCloud at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference and were immediately intrigued but didn’t have the cycles to look into it until this past summer, when when we made the switch from cloud-first to a cloud-only strategy.

We’ve been running ParkMyCloud since the week before re:Invent in 2017. From there, we had our first presentation to our leadership team in December 2017, where we showed that the uptick in savings was dramatic. It’s leveled off right now because we have a lot of new workloads coming in, but the savings are still noticeable. We still have developers who think that their dev system has to be always be on and at will, but they don’t understand that now that we have ParkMyCloud, making it “at will” is as simple as an API call or the click of a button. I expect to see our savings to grow over the rest of the calendar year.

We have 50+ teams and over 500 users on ParkMyCloud now.

That’s great to hear! So how much are you saving on your cloud costs with ParkMyCloud?

Our lifetime savings thus far is $28,000, and the tool has paid for itself pretty quickly.

We have one team who has over 40% savings on their workloads. They were spending on average about $10,000 a month, and now it’s at $5,800 because they leverage ParkMyCloud’s simplified scheduling start/stop capabilities.

What other benefits are you getting from your use of the platform?

What I really like is that we have given most of our senior directors, who actually own the budgets, access to the tool as well. It lets the senior directors, as well as the executives when I present to them, see the actual cost savings. It gives you the ability to shine light in places that people don’t like to have the light shine.

The development team at ParkMyCloud has also been very open to receiving suggestions and capabilities that will help us improve savings and increase user adoption.

That’s great, and please continue to submit your feedback and requests to us! And in that regard, have you tried our SmartParking feature to get recommended schedules based on your usage?

Yes, we have started to. When I’m asked by a team to show them how we suggest they use the tool, they get to decide whether or not to enforce it. I’ll say that they are exceedingly happy by the fact that they can go and see their usage. One developer is telling their team that the feature has to be on at all times.

Are there any other cost savings measures that you use in conjunction with ParkMyCloud or in addition?

We pull numbers and look at Amazon’s best prices guide for sizing. We also take the recommendations from ParkMyCloud and we cross compare those.

Do you have any other feedback for us?

The magic of ParkMyCloud is that it empowers the end user to make decisions for the betterment of business, and gives us the needed visibility to do our jobs effectively. That’s the bottom line. Each user has a decision: I can spend money on wasted resources or I can save it where I can and apply the savings to other projects. Once you start to understand that, then you have that “AHA” moment.

Before using ParkMyCloud, most developers have no awareness of the expense of their workloads. This tool allows me to unfilter that data so they can see, for example: this workload is $293 a month, every month. If you look at your entire environment, you’re spending $17,000 a month, but if you take it down just for the weekend, you could be saving $2–3,000 a month or more depending on how aggressive you want to be, without hurting your ability to support the business. It’s that “AHA” moment that is satisfying to watch.

That’s what we noticed immediately when we looked at the summary reports — the uptick that appears right after you have these presentations with the team makes your heart feel good.

Well thank you Kurt, again we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.

Thank you.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on March 22, 2018.