NOVEMBER 2020CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19them. The second piece is helping people understand what they're buying and to build the bridge between finance and technology teams, and we call this Clarity and Transparency. We try to make the data that exists within the cloud's billing and the usage as clear as possible so that the departments get what they need out of it. If people want to ask a question to a colleague in another department, they can, and it will be understood because they're speaking a single common language. The final piece of the jigsaw is our cost optimization. We call it "People Powered FinOps," where we're using our specialist financial solutions and architects alongside our tooling to help people get the best possible price. We look at commitments such as savings plans, reserved instances and many more. We will then give the customer advice on the best ways of using it. We will always make sure that we offer an as good if not better discount price than buying directly from cloud vendors. And we do this because we take risks in how we acquire our discounts and commitments on a portfolio level. So we're helping customers get a better price than they could on their own. One particular customer, Form3, has been working with Strategic Blue for quite some years now. As a company that places technology at the core of their business, Strategic Blue was able to help them walk from their initial phase where they just had credits to billing significant amounts of money through the cloud. Strategic Blue helps them grow, innovate, win customers, watch their spend, and constantly offer new ways of finding more savings. We have a great relationship with them, constantly looking at new pieces. So as they continue to grow, they know that the costs are remaining controlled throughout.What would you say is the future for Strategic Blue?We're continuing to grow, which has been fantastic. And I've had some very exciting partnerships work, such as the cloud bike project with the national science foundation--part of the work we do with UCSB which is really beginning to accelerate. We're looking at getting people across in the US as soon as COVID allows because we are still adding people almost constantly. We've hired four new people in the last few weeks, so we're continuing to thrive and grow and take our next big steps forward into 2021. We give people a common understanding of cloud billing to help them see more from the cloud usage data and identify what will help them do their job
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