In a traditional business model, a vendor provides a service for a fee whether success is realized or not. At the cloud management platform provider nOps Inc., no one gets paid until a customer saves money.

This unusual approach is based on optimizing cloud commitments for customers, where savings are compared to on-demand usage and if resources are paused, nOps receives a percentage of the amount saved.

“Customers only pay if we save them money, so we just take a percentage of the savings,” said JT Giri (pictured), chief executive officer of nOps Inc. “It’s a powerful model. It drives focus on our end on one thing: How can we optimize costs for our customers? I do believe that is the future of cloud management.”

Giri spoke with John Furrier, industry analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase on June 8. They discussed how FinOps and nOps are seeking to transform ways that enterprises control cloud costs. (* Disclosure below.)

Making it easy so engineers can take action

The approach taken by nOps is part of the expanding FinOps movement, an area of focus among firms that specialize in providing visibility and accountability in cloud spending throughout the enterprise. “The State of FinOps 2023” report from the FinOps Foundation noted that organizations managing between $50 million and $500 million of cloud costs were experiencing the largest rate of FinOps growth overall.

“One of the hardest things to do in FinOps is to make it easy so engineers can take action,” Giri said. “We focus on automation. When you show the data to the developers and when you provide a one-click experience, we do see people actually take action and end up saving a lot of money on their dev environments.”

Automation plays a key role in the nOps platform. The company’s one-click experience is based on AI models that can identify areas where savings could be quickly realized and streamline the process for taking appropriate action.

“The future of cloud management is AI and automation,” Giri said. “Rather than managing commitments on spreadsheets, we have a model that automatically learns how we can maximize commitments for customers. We find resource patterns depending on that. We cannot do what we are doing without AI and machine learning.”

The market for cloud management is expanding at a time when companies are looking to control costs and engineers need to focus on generating new sources of revenue. Giri’s company is positioning itself as a central resource for reallocating cloud spend and was recently ranked number one in the G2 Cloud Cost Management category.

“We make sure that customers are paying less for what they have provisioned,” Giri said. “Engineers are good at building stuff. Maybe they are not good at understanding the AWS pricing plan. Our idea is to free them up so they don’t have to manage these commitments on a day-to-day basis.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s upcoming “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase on June 8:

(* Disclosure: nOps Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither nOps nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE