Partner Spotlight: Meeting customers where they are, with Aran Khanna
About Aran: Born and raised in Seattle, Aran Khanna studied computer science & mathematics at Harvard. Before founding Archera, Aran was an engineer at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services and founded Glia Intelligence, a machine learning consultancy focused on the Retail industry. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ [JR]: Tell us about Archera and your mission. What inspired the founding? [AK]: The idea for Archera came from my experience launching a machine learning service on a major cloud hyperscaler in 2016, where cost was a major issue for deep learning workloads. For many customers experimenting with AI and machine learning, it’s not easy to predict what their workloads will look like in production, so they end up either running up their bill while they consume at list price, or not getting started in the first place after seeing what it would cost. I wanted to make it easier to experiment with intelligent apps by making costs more predictable and giving customers the flexibility to change their architecture as they discovered more about the needs of their business. I also didn’t want to tax customers on a percentage of total spend or savings like other cost management solutions do, because many of these calculations include optimization work the customer has achieved by themselves. So, we launched a platform that is totally free when it comes to cost modeling and booking native cloud commitments, and enables customers to purchase insurance for their commitments to give them that extra flexibility and confidence. [JR]: Can you tell us a bit about the application(s) you have available on the marketplace? How does it work? [AK]:Archera is a free cloud management platform offering the first insurance product for Azure savings plans, reservations, and private pricing. We help customers commit more confidently to Azure services by eliminating the financial risks of unused commitments. That confidence helps Azure customers using Archera accelerate their Azure migration and modernization projects. Customers tend to commit more, commit faster, and commit for longer when they know they can cover commitments with our insurance and get the best rates from Microsoft. Archera fills the gaps between existing Azure reservations and savings plans, which require one-year or three-year commitments. We enable flexible commitment tools: like 30-day commitments where Archera covers any commitment losses for up to 35 additional months. [JR]: AI is top of mind for all of us. How is Archera leveraging or planning to leverage AI in app development? [AK]: AI is central to our platform in two ways. For our end customers, cost is a major issue for deep learning workloads. Even compared to other cloud services, it’s harder to predict what you’ll spend on AI services, so calculating ROI can be a real mess. We make ROI easier to predict with our free forecasting and cost analysis platform. But, even when you’re in Production and you’ve bought your Azure OpenAI PTUs (provisioned throughput units), and you have a sophisticated FinOps practice in place, nothing is 100% certain, so our insurance is there to hedge the remaining risk. Within the platform itself, we use machine learning to help customers forecast and optimize their cloud spend across the hundreds of services available on Azure. We also use statistical models to calculate the premiums for the commitment insurance at the core of our solution. [JR]: What Microsoft cloud products did you use in your app development? What value is this enabling with your customers? [AK]: We leverage Azure Kubernetes Service to run our SaaS app, which helps us optimize our own use of cloud resources and keep the platform free for our customers. [JR]: How has Microsoft supported you along your journey? [AK]: Microsoft Founders Hub has been a great resource to us. We leveraged the Azure credits for our development on the Azure platform and are starting to use the OpenAI benefits to improve our prediction engine on the back end. It’s always helpful to get 1:1 access to Microsoft business and technical experts. [JR]: How does Archera align its business to enabling positive impact for your customers and communities? [AK]: Giving customers the ability to increase their commitment coverage makes their Azure workloads much more sustainable. Our customer-aligned model contrasts with commitment arbitrage products, offering better control for customers and no requirement to relinquish ownership of their billing accounts. We provide a secure financial model for our customers to launch their next great intelligent app. [JR]: Have you collaborated with other partners in the Microsoft ecosystem? How has this collaboration been beneficial? [AK]: We fully support Multiparty Private Offers (MPO) and ISV to CSP Private Offers. That keeps the paperwork simple for our channel and makes it easy for customers to buy from their preferred Microsoft partner. We partner with other ISVs too. Not only do we help ISVs keep their COGS in check, when customers purchase third party solutions from other publishers in the marketplace and run those solutions on their own Azure infrastructure, they can buy reservations and savings plans for that infrastructure too. That reduces the TCO for the end customer without impacting the publisher’s margins, so it’s a win-win. [JR]: What motivated you to publish a transactable offer on the commercial marketplace? [AK]: We wanted to meet customers where they are. Since our customers buy Azure reservations and savings plans in the Azure portal, we knew from the start that our product should be available on the same platform and on the same bill. So it was an obvious choice for us — It’s the closest we can get to being a truly native offering. [JR]: How has the ability to transact directly on the marketplace influenced your sales strategy and customer interactions? [AK]: We work with Azure customers of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, across industries like Healthcare, Media and Entertainment, Digital Natives, and Financial Services. All our customers buy us through a cloud marketplace, so being transactable is part and parcel of the Archera experience. The platform itself is free, and when customers purchase commitment insurance through the platform, that transaction flows through the marketplace and appears on their Azure bill, so it’s transparent and easy to understand. Our pricing model includes both pay-as-you-go and upfront options, which mirrors Microsoft’s purchase options for the underlying Azure reservations and savings plans. We wanted to introduce as little friction as possible to how customers buy from Microsoft. [JR]: Congrats on launching Archera on the Azure Marketplace! What excites you about having this offer on the marketplace, and how do you see yourself growing? [AK]: We are very excited to offer our customers the first ever Azure commitment insurance, exclusively available from Azure Marketplace. For our customers, deploying the platform and purchasing reservations through Marketplace is a seamless experience. For us, it represents a significant growth opportunity, with Microsoft customers around the world now able to leverage flexible-term commitment instruments for the first time. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Resources: Join ISV Success Join themarketplace communityCustomer review: Compliance Process Automation for Teams ensures conformity to financial regulations
Compliance Automation for Teams is a solution from Open Lake Technology published to Microsoft AppSource. It automatically ensures compliance with financial regulations, providing companies of all sizes alerts and reporting regarding the financial rules about communication services. Microsoft interviewed G.F., head of infrastructure at a European asset manager, to learn what they had to say about the solution.
