The Future is Here Now: Cost-Based Collaboration

With ever-increasing tech spending, organisations are demanding better understanding and management of costs.

With ever-increasing tech spending, organisations are demanding better understanding and management of costs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. While vendors often promise lower costs by eliminating the need for infrastructure management, many organisations are seeing costs rise dramatically and are often caught off guard by their bills.

Consequently, executives begin to ask tough questions of their teams:

• Why am I always surprised when the bill arrives?

• How can I better plan and budget for total costs?

• How do we better manage our vendor usage?

• Where do we begin to optimise our expenses?

More importantly, there are critical financial questions that need clear answers:

• How much does this product or service cost?

• How profitable is this new feature?

• What is our true cost of goods sold?

Today, these questions can be difficult to answer. Engineering and Operations may have access to extensive log data, but interpreting costs can be challenging. There is no single, trusted source of data that enables Finance, Operations, and other departments to communicate effectively about cost management.

This burden typically falls on Finance.

What’s Needed in a Perfect World?

The ability to understand operational costs in real-time is essential. This would allow Finance, Operations, and Engineering to interpret and contextualise cost-related information across products, teams, departments, and the entire organisation.

Introducing Cost Intelligence

In a perfect world, Finance, Engineering, and Operations would have automated, real-time cost reviews of their systems, continuously highlighting the cost implications of architectural and procurement decisions.

Cost Intelligence is about establishing cost-based collaboration across teams and disciplines. The ideal scenario is one where organisations leverage cost as a primary operational metric.

• Imagine understanding costs in real-time, knowing how much each event costs the organisation as it happens.

• Imagine presenting COGS visually to the executive team, just like site traffic or latency metrics.

• Imagine seeing cost flows across the organization and understanding how new features impact costs in real-time.

• Imagine knowing in advance if an anomalous spike might lead to a significant increase in your cloud bill.

• Imagine predicting and identifying cost trends with granular precision.

• Imagine teams, departments, and the entire organization working together with a single source of truth for costs.

Finally, imagine achieving all of this without spending months setting up agents, integrating APIs, or conducting extensive training sessions.

Now, imagine Bilanc. Delivering on the promise of Cost Intelligence, leveraging cost as an operational metric across the organisation.