Can you trade cloud like you trade coal?

This month Aled and Alasdair are joined by Dr James Mitchell, founder and CEO of Strategic Blue. Strategic Blue specialise in cloud financial operations and partner with leading cloud vendors like AWS, Microsoft and Google to bring a commodity trading approach to cloud resale. 

A scientist by training, James’ journey to cloud was an unconventional one. From a PhD in DNA Nanotechnology to commodities trading and investing in green data centers, we delve into how James developed Strategic Blue’s unique approach, how it helps them offer better prices than the vendors themselves and the options for cloud consumers to manage and optimise their costs. 

This approach to cost optimisation, coupled with FinOps Principles, helps to accelerate cloud adoption within organisations, so James has some great tips for quick wins to save on your cloud spend alongside longer term solutions for optimisation. 

We also talk about the need to educate CFOs about the value of cloud, especially in unpredictable times and how to join up Financial Operations with Cloud Operations for maximum value. 

You can listen to Strategic Blue’s own podcast, What’s New In Cloud FinOps, here.

About the hosts

Aled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems. Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.

Connect with Aled

Alasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leading
authority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance and other service-based sectors such as telecoms, electronic design and supply-chain automation for over 12 years.

Connect with Alasdair

About Cloudsoft

Cloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.

Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We’re an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.

Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. This maximises value from their technology investments, drives down costs and reduces risks. Cloudsoft AMP is the only product which strategically manages applications throughout their lifecycles across hybrid infrastructures, regardless of environment or location.

We're based in Edinburgh, UK, but work with clients around the world.