Optimisation is Part of the Journey

👋🏻 Hello and welcome to this edition of Interesting Stuff, your fortnightly dose of things I think you’ll find interesting if you’re in the world of Azure, partners, small business, and Microsoft. I’m James Marshall, SMB Azure Partner Success Lead for the UK at Microsoft, and if you find this content useful please remember to subscribe and share this with your network. Thank you! 😎

In this edition, you’ll find:

💭 My thoughts on why spend optimisation should be your secret weapon.
📝 A summary of the latest Azure updates.
📰 Interesting articles I’ve seen around the web.

Some Thoughts

I’ve been out of my shed-office recently attending a few events. It’s been a great reminder of how powerful it can be to connect with people in real life! At one of these events, I was taking part in a roundtable and the conversation moved towards Azure (you can imagine my excitement!). “Surely optimisation doesn’t really help you if you’re trying to grow your Azure revenue”, someone said.

I can see why they’d think that. Helping to optimise deployments can lead to reduced spending. If you’re making your money based on how much your customers use, then less is… less, right? 🤔

Let’s look at it a different way.

Savings vs Investments

Before we dive in, it’s worth calling out that this is going to be a simplified explanation of a complex topic that’s given rise to whole fields of cloud management like FinOps, and cloud economists. Professionals who deeply understand the value of cloud technology its impact on a business.

In essence, the smart move is to position savings gained through optimisation work as opportunities to tackle other technology priorities on the customer’s roadmap.

If left simply as “money saved”, there’s a risk that those funds will be swallowed up elsewhere in the customer and you’ll have missed a chance to land a new project.

The most adept partners are those who’ve embedded themselves as trusted advisors. They excel at this positioning. Optimisation is their secret weapon because they know the customer’s business priorities, the roadmap of things to do, and they can quickly spot how to apply savings in one area to a new project in another. They’re highly curious about their customers.

Although, nobody has an infinite budget. Reinvesting savings — especially when supercharged with a funded offer — can help move along the roadmap more quickly, leading to increased cloud spend.

In Summary

Optimisation can be a way to save money, and sometimes that’s what’s needed when a customer is facing financial pressure. The savvy move is to align savings in one area to new projects in another making it part of the journey so that over time a customer will grow their spend.

Either way, it pays to be curious. You never know what opportunities you might find!

Azure Updates

As ever, there’s always something new to know, so here’s a selection of updates you might find interesting: Get the digest!

Interesting Stuff from Others

Azure SQL HA and DR

You can’t go far in the Azure world without coming across the truly fantastic content-creating powerhouse that is John Savill. I swear he must have a time machine to allow him to create so much in depth, high quality stuff. In this video he unpacks everything you need to know about Azure SQL high availability and disaster recovery scenarios.

How cool is GitHub Copilot Chat?

From one great content creator to another. I saw this great short video from April Edwards in my timeline this week. In it, she showcases the power of GitHub Copilot Chat and how it can transform the way you create and test Terraform scripts to write better infrastructure-as-code.

Until next time…

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