Gavin Gee joins the Caliper Team

I’m excited to announce I have become an advisor to CaliperSoftware.ai. 

I was initially drawn to Caliper because of the team involved, their customer-focused product velocity, and the simplicity of their user-centric product design. They are focused on a specific source of pain in organizations: Enabling financial operations teams to understand their AWS and Snowflake usage and costs. 

As I engaged, I realized they were moving toward something much bigger and more exciting.

Throughout my career, I have encountered consistent friction in business; a need for more speed and efficiency in getting the right data at the right time to the right people to enable decisions and understanding, all at the pace of a modern business. 

I saw this friction at Microsoft in Office 365 as a marketer trying to understand product metrics connected with transaction and revenue data. At AWS, trying to piece together disparate systems and data to automate and optimize the customer funnel and reduce the cost of customer acquisition. Considerable inertia is introduced in what are deemed world-class companies by poor data or data only in the hands of some teams at certain times. Individual engineering or operations teams might have great metrics on product usage, but if finance or marketing teams can’t correctly forecast or understand usage, it’s difficult to be credible with investors or make the correct investment decisions. Caliper democratizes cloud usage and data spend analysis at breakneck speed, creating a common language in analytics that all departments can use. 

Additionally, software vendors, especially the large incumbent software and cloud vendors, all struggle with another challenge: They see the world through their own lens.

For example, Microsoft still needs to work on empowering customers with diverse vendor selections in their IT estate, i.e., customers who are not 100% Microsoft shops, mainly because of the culture of selling enterprise agreements. AWS’s two pizza teams and its working backward culture lead to a focus on solving customer problems related primarily to their tech stack. Yet almost 90% of customers are multi-cloud, and 97% of IT teams intend to continue investing in cloud technologies. There is a growing need for cross-vendor tools like Caliper at a time when those same vendors are distracted with AI product development.

Interest rates don’t look like they are coming down any time soon. Gone are the days of ZIRP product development. Companies need to get cash flow positive and quickly. Managing and optimizing costs, especially cloud and software costs, is a critical component for leadership teams. Many cost and usage tools are single vendor-focused and typically charge based on a percentage of savings. As cloud costs have ballooned, tool costs have also become prohibitive.  Caliper doesn't believe in this model. Caliper believes that a customer’s savings are the customer’s. They believe in providing tools for fair value and enabling employees to get their jobs done, regardless of where they sit in the organization. 

We have become accustomed to lengthy and complex software deployment journeys that leave us with feelings of dread. Who has had a sales call where the pitch went great, the solution solved an identified pain, and the price looked great… but momentum stalled as the burden of figuring out how to deploy (and who needed to be involved) became apparent, even for a trial or proof of concept? We’ve all been there.  

This is different with Caliper. A key piece of magic in the Caliper software platform is how customers can get set up and see real-world savings immediately. These are the unique data engineering investments made by the Caliper team that enable financial operations teams and others to get value fast, and they are visualized in an actionable heat map. Every customer Caliper has deployed gets access, observes insights, and identifies potential exponential savings in 15 minutes. In most cases, those initial savings pay for Caliper and then some. That’s unheard of. 

As I think about Caliper's future, I’m reminded of a Jeff Bezos quote: “In business, focus on things that will remain true.” 

Five things will remain true. 

One, great data will lead to great AI capabilities.
Two, the diversity of vendors will increase.
Three, customers want to understand and drive down usage and costs across their vendor portfolio.
Four, costs and IT deployment complexity will continue to increase. 
Five, engineering teams want easier and faster ways to spin up new capabilities. 

Caliper is uniquely positioned for these truths and is immediately implementable to deliver meaningful value to customers.

I couldn't be more excited to be part of the journey with the team.  Let's Go!