Why we founded Millworks and launched Caliper™
As a former CFO at Tableau and DataRobot, I discovered first-hand the complexity of navigating all things cloud-related: from moving processes and workflows to the cloud to managing the vast demands required to build out an organization’s cloud compute and storage.
I’ve seen how consumption business models can rapidly increase an organization’s costs and directly impact the bottom-line. As CFO, my job was to balance the very real benefits that moving to the cloud brings such as improved security, performance, and uptime while managing rapidly rising compute and storage costs—no easy task when so many more workloads are moving to the cloud today! It’s a monumental challenge that no single team member or even department should ever weather alone.
While there exist plenty of tools today to manage cloud data, I believe we have yet to see a single platform that offers complete visibility and insight across all public cloud usage and spend, while also providing for the ability to drill down into specific usage and trends with accuracy and precision. In our research leading up to the launch of Caliper, we came to understand that there needed to be a better way of navigating the various idiosyncrasies and complexities of multiple cloud-based business processes and spend. What we needed was a way to understand this complexity quickly and accurately. Visualization and the ability to ask questions of data would be a core part of our DNA.
Before we developed our solution, we met with hundreds of individuals across FinOps, DevOps and other data related roles to hear what was important to them. We heard loud and clear they want the following:
Analytical depth and flexibility
Smart categorization
Predictive capabilities
Persona-based gamification
Ability to support multi-cloud and consumption services
Collaborative governance
We have developed a long-term roadmap that addresses their feedback. The first step in this journey is our release of Caliper which dramatically improves analytical depth and flexibility for customers. Innovation is core to what we are doing here at Millworks and we are working to delight our customers with future innovation across all of these product innovation pillars.
Caliper addresses all of these customer priorities from the ground up by helping each team—FinOps and DevOps—quickly answer deeper contextual questions, understand trade-offs and enable positive outcomes. We leverage a blazingly fast and flexible analytical platform so users can drill-down across every spend category and create precise, detailed multidimensional views (including heatmaps!) at the speed of thought.
As a buyer of software myself, I also know customers want a solution that is simple and easy to use, as well as at a predictable low cost. Making the complex appear simple for customers is a passion of mine and extends not only to our product but also how we interact with our customers, our employees and other stakeholders. I also believe it is important to keep our solution inexpensive and pricing transparent. We aim to achieve this by having streamlined operations and being highly efficient in everything that we do.
Internally we like to say “every day matters” which is an important reminder that the cloud and technology landscape evolve rapidly so we must not only continually innovate to delight our customers but we must also always stay at the forefront of having a secure and governed platform.
We know all too well from our own experience that your cloud environments evolve rapidly whether it be customer behavior or new features or products—driving deeper and more complex questions of your data. Optimizing your cloud environment in real-time requires thoughtful analysis and can't be taken lightly – that’s where Caliper comes in.
We invite you to come try Caliper at www.millworks.ai/caliper
— Damon Fletcher, CEO and Co-Founder at Millworks Analytics
