Executive Summary
2bcloud, a specialized cloud services partner managing hundreds of customer accounts, needed to scale their FinOps practice without expanding headcount. Their team was drowning in manual reporting, fragmented alerts, and one-off automation attempts that broke frequently.
After deploying OpenOps as an open-source solution, 2bcloud moved from proof-of-concept to full production in just three weeks. The platform now delivers centralized automation workflows, automated commitment tracking, and streamlined lead generation—driving measurable efficiency improvements of 10% in operations, 8% in finOps, and 5% in customer success
About 2bcloud
2bcloud is a global managed service provider (MSP) specializing in helping tech companies, ISV’s and startups optimize their cloud infrastructure, costs, and AI strategy.
Supporting 400+ customers globally, 2bcloud holds premier partner status with Microsoft and AWS and delivers unmatched engineering expertise, support, and vendor benefits – all bundled with their cloud bill.
The company manages a diverse portfolio of customer accounts with a lean central team, forwarding savings to customers and relying on sophisticated automation to maintain service quality while scaling their practice. Their approach combines financial analysis with architectural guidance, delivering insights that drive both immediate optimization and strategic planning.
The Scaling Challenge
2bcloud’s growth created a few interesting challenges:
- Resource Constraints: 2bcloud’s FinOps and operations team stayed roughly the same size as they served an expanding customer base. As the business scaled, manual reporting took up resources better spent on more strategic initiatives.
- Fragmented Visibility: With customer environments expanding rapidly, the 2bcloud team sought a unified view of alerts and usage data across multiple channels. They wanted to streamline signal prioritization and respond even faster to cost and performance anomalies.
- Stakeholder Engagement Gaps: To further strengthen executive visibility, the team aimed to automate management-grade reporting and ensure optimization insights reached business and finance leaders directly.
- Reporting Inefficiencies: Critical workflows like expired reservation tracking required custom development that the team couldn’t justify given resource constraints. This created opportunities to improve automation depth, without the overhead of larger firms.
Previous Automation Attempts
Before implementing OpenOps, 2bcloud experimented with various approaches:
- AWS Lambda Functions: The team built scheduled functions for routine data collection, but these required ongoing maintenance and debugging when AWS APIs changed or customer configurations evolved.
- Custom Python Scripts: Engineering resources developed bespoke automation for specific customers, but while technically sound, these custom solutions weren’t scalable, pushing the team to look for a platform-level answer.
These approaches shared common problems: they were slow to develop, expensive to maintain, and didn’t scale across the customer portfolio. Each new requirement meant additional development cycles rather than configuration changes.
The OpenOps Solution
2bcloud integrated OpenOps into its internal automation stack to accelerate delivery of repeatable, low-code workflows across its customer base. OpenOps complemented 2bcloud’s engineering-led FinOps practice by enabling faster deployment of automation at scale, without compromising the quality or speed customers expect.
The implementation focused on three core areas:
Expired Reservation Tracking
This capability enhanced an existing service strength and helped push even more proactive savings insights upstream:
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Cross-Account Visibility: 2bcloud engineers leveraged OpenOps to centralize reservation data across accounts, surfacing expiration risks faster than native cloud tools allowed.
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Proactive Outreach: Automated signals now trigger early conversations around renewals, shifting customer engagement from reactive to strategic.
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Competitive Differentiation: This capability distinguishes 2bcloud from competitors who rely on manual tracking or basic AWS reporting.
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Lead Generation Automation
Converting their free security compliance tool into a business development engine:
- User Identification: Weekly jobs identify new tool users and compile contact information for business development follow-up.
- Warm Outreach: Instead of cold calling, the sales team contacts prospects who have already demonstrated interest in cloud optimization services.
- Pipeline Efficiency: Automated lead qualification saves approximately three hours weekly for the FinOps lead while improving conversion rates.
Portfolio-Level Engagement Metrics
To support growth without losing visibility, 2bcloud used OpenOps to surface high-impact signals across its portfolio:
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Automated Reporting: Weekly rollups identify accounts requiring immediate attention, enabling proactive outreach rather than reactive support.
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Trend Analysis: Historical patterns helped identify accounts ready for service expansion or those needing re-engagement, enabling the customer success team to act faster and more strategically.
Implementation Experience
The deployment process validated OpenOps’ accessibility and business impact:
Rapid Value Recognition
2bcloud began with an open-source deployment on a single EC2 instance to test the platform’s capabilities. Within three weeks and with only three workflows deployed, management observed sufficient value to approve full production deployment—a remarkably fast enterprise software adoption cycle.
Learning and Adoption
While the initial learning curve required some adjustment, the team quickly mastered core principles and began self-serving new workflow requirements. This autonomy aligned well with 2bcloud’s engineering-first operating model.
Organic Expansion
Success with initial use cases led management to request additional workflows for broader visibility and control. The platform’s flexibility enabled rapid response to these evolving requirements without lengthy development cycles.
Measurable Results
The implementation delivered quantifiable improvements across multiple teams:
Efficiency Improvements
- Operations Team: 10% productivity increase through automated monitoring and reporting
- FinOps Practice: 8% efficiency gain from streamlined anomaly management and customer insights
- Customer Success: 5% improvement in responsiveness and account management effectiveness
Time Savings
- Anomaly Response: Significant reduction in time-to-resolution through consolidated reporting and clear ownership
- Customer Engagement: Faster decision cycles through management-grade summaries and proactive outreach capabilities
- Lead Generation: 3 hours per week recovered through automated prospect identification and qualification
Operational Excellence
- Signal Consolidation: Replaced fragmented alert streams with single-source reporting
- Process Standardization: Consistent workflows across customer accounts improve service quality and reduce training overhead
- Strategic Focus: Reduced administrative burden enables more time for high-value customer engagement and strategic planning
Business Impact Beyond Efficiency
The OpenOps implementation extended 2bcloud’s automation framework and reinforced their service delivery model:
- Enhanced Service Quality: Consistent workflows and unified governance over them improve the reliability and depth of customer engagement across the portfolio
- Competitive Positioning: Capabilities like expired reservation tracking and portfolio-level analytics differentiate 2bcloud from competitors relying on manual processes or basic tooling.
- Scalable Growth: The platform provides the operational foundation needed to expand customer portfolios without proportional headcount increases.
- Strategic Evolution: Reduced administrative burden enables the team to focus on high-value activities like strategic planning, customer education, and service innovation.
Looking Forward
2bcloud’s OpenOps deployment demonstrates how specialized service providers can leverage automation to scale expertise rather than simply reducing costs. OpenOps enables the 2bcloud team to deliver enterprise-grade FinOps services across a large customer portfolio while maintaining the speed and hands-on expertise technology companies expect, backed by a global MSP infrastructure.
As cloud environments continue growing in complexity, the ability to systematically identify optimization opportunities, engage stakeholders effectively, and deliver consistent value will increasingly separate successful FinOps practices from those overwhelmed by operational demands.
