#718: From cost center to value creator: How IT automation creates business value

0:00This is episode 718 of the AWS podcast released on April 28th, 2025. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Adibus Podcast. I'm Alex here with you. Great to have you back, joined by not one but two very special guests. Today, firstly, I'm joined by Adrian Samiguel, who's a principal enterprise architect here at Adibus. G'day, Adrian, how are you going? Hey, doing well, Simon. Good to chat with you again. It's been too long and I kind of feel guilty about that. Well, let's assuage that guilt. We're also joined by Greg Harris, who's a senior solutions architect and is located in the great state of Texas.

0:34although let's see if we can guess from his accent where he's from. Welcome to the podcast, Greg. Yeah, thanks, Simon. It's great to be here. It's the first time here with you, and I haven't talked to Adrian for a little while as well, so it'll be good to catch up with him too. Exactly. We're all going to have a good chat. And for those playing at home, yes, Greg is a Kiwi, so he's my cousin. Go and hold that against him. Expect good-natured ribbing. Deep, deep, deep South Texas. so the topic today is performance but it's in a different lens so if we often think about performance from a technology standpoint we spend an age discussing speeds and feeds the latest hardware which chipset is right which ai model works faster how many teraflops we can squeeze out of things there's like lots of detail that you need to go into and you do need to go into that But it's interesting from a business standpoint, I'll do the big reveal, most business people don't care about that stuff.

1:36They sort of wave the arms and go, yeah, my IT folks worry about that stuff. So today we want to talk a bit about performance, both from a technology standpoint, but from a business outcome perspective. So maybe, Adrian, let me start with you. Give us some context of what you've been seeing at the macro level and why we're talking about this today. Sure. So more and more, given the economic headwinds and what have you, that the current climate has kind of brought to us, and I'll leave it at that, there has been a bit of a renewed focus and kind of the age-old adage of wanting to treat IT as a cost center that's never really gone away.

2:13And even though in the pre-COVID times, you're starting to finally get IT and tech and business folks in the room to actually talk together and work together, we've kind of taken a bit of a step back there, especially with the additional expenditures of folks getting to cloud and rushing to get these projects done in a timely fashion. And as we continue to normalize, it's kind of one of those things, a bit of a finger-pointing exercise saying, hey, you didn't realize the value that you told us we did this, or we're maybe actually spending a little more money. But what I'm seeing is for the first time in quite some time, IT is transforming itself from a cost center to a revenue generator.

2:51And this has an interesting focus on performance because in the old days, you would take a knock, for example, where I lost most of my hair and the color in my hair due to being up at unforsaken hours of the night. A while back in about 2019, and I did a reInvent talk on it, GPS BUS202, where we talk about the cost of not doing stuff. And that's still very true, where if you take an individual that is chasing gremlins, for example, high CPU, that has a real dollar value to it. And this is what the business people always look at. It costs money to staff a knock. It costs money to do X, Y, and Z.

3:29and eventually you have to change the perspective in the conversation from, this is also what we're able to do for you because we're not doing that. What I'm starting to see now in the partner space and interestingly enough, and I know Gen.AI is the soup du jour and that's all anybody wants to talk to, but I promise this is actually like a real thing that isn't something hokey or that can be put together in about two minutes. A partner of mine that I, excuse me, worked with quite deeply, Innovative Solutions, they were able to eat their own dog food and prove back to the business, yes, we can help you by not having to run our systems and focus on actually reducing the footprint that we consume.

4:08They're able to cut a business process for month-end invoices for about 84 hours by using AI and using AWS services in about an hour and a half, two hours tops. So 84 hours to two hours to do a business process. 84 to two, three individuals, full-time employees dedicated to re-rating, recoding, invoicing, triage, no longer doing that. They hit the button, magic think box goes and spits out a thing, a quick QA and QC is done, off to the races. Customers are singing praises about more accurate invoices, less need for a follow-up, less need for getting on the phone and nobody wants to call and dispute a charge.

4:49And for the first time in a long time, this partner is actually feeling valued at the table by its business counterparts simply because of the performance that they were able to bake into their systems and just let the bots, let the automation, the self-healing value silicon over carbon. Let the machines do their thing so we can help you, the business, start realizing that revenue of no longer having to chase that pie in the sky. And of course, I've got plenty of different stories here, but it would be interesting to hear if I'm kind of scratching that itch that you're talking about. Now, it's interesting, the perspective there is very different.

5:28As you mentioned, these are folks who are adept at performance analysis and diving deep on technology domains, et cetera, yet they've been forced or wanted to pivot into a business process and identifying often what to the outside observer is just, oh, well, that's obvious or it's low hanging fruit, but it may not be because often the quote unquote business side, and I dislike using that term in as much as we're all part of the same business but if we have to categorize tech and non-tech you know the non-tech folks don't know what to ask the tech folks for and so the tech folks kind of need to ask the non-tech folks hey what what takes the longest and if someone says well it takes us 80 hours to do month then there's three folks doing it and they have a clear-eyed view and go actually we could change that there's a mental model shift here that i want to i want to dive into adrian how do you how did they sort of come to that like they didn't just trip over 80 hours of processing it oh we could fix that like what had to happen so what had to happen is as so far as many of us that may have children or know folks that have children like to be held as a bonus uncle it has to hurt a little bit sometimes and in that regard there's so many things that you can do to to warn people and help them see around the short corners or as you mentioned bump your head with the low hanging fruit but it's until that there's a level of discomfort than is commensurate with understanding that you have to go and do something.

6:53That's really what it took here. And in this partner's case, it took the realization that they were falling behind on invoicing, that they were missing their SLAs to customers, that it was a difficult decision to have to really look at things where everybody across the industry is batting down the hatches and reducing the amount of expenditures that they have and to have to be confronted with, if we continue at this trajectory as we take on customers and expand our scope of support, we're going to have to hire two, three, five, potentially 10, a full staff of it. Yeah, it's only going to get worse.

7:29Exactly. And the sprawl becomes exponentially more difficult as this partner begins doing more things like exploring going up upward into the enterprise market as opposed to the SMB greenfield space where they're playing today, which again, incidentally, because of their hyper-focus on performance, they can actually help the business go out and tackle these things. But as they're doing that, exactly to your point, they came back to the business and very much so as a white-glove consultancy to come back and say, hey, look, what are the top three things that are bothering you folks? In very much the same way that they would approach a customer, they are approaching the internal business stakeholders.

8:07And here's key, they're approaching them just like a customer of ITObs, of the IT team, where they're saying, don't worry about the machines, we'll sort the bits and bobs. What we care about is helping you achieve your business outcome in leveraging of tech to do so. Now, I'm guessing part of that comes from a degree of, I guess, trust or awareness or connection where, you know, if as an IT function, you're struggling to keep the systems up and running, typically the business stakeholders are not that interested in having these cool conversations with you. They're like, hey, just, I don't even trust you to run the stuff.

8:41Tell us a bit about some of the technology underpinnings that allow this to happen. Because you touched a bit on self-healing and automation, but let's dive deep on that. What's in place for this customer to help them get to this point? So the partner is making use of just about every single one of our AWS managed services, but also is a strong proponent of automation by default. So much so that their support team is no more than a handful of individuals for their external and their internal customers, like the different business units and auxiliary companies that they work with. They're a very power, whatever the next upper echelon is beyond power user of EKS.

9:18They are a very strong user of SageMaker. They believe heavily in distributed systems as well as NoSQL. So they're power users of DynamoDB where they have fully bought in as a managed service provider to allow the managed services to do the thing so that you can use your humans to actually better your business processes, to actually work on iterating and improving your P90s, your P99s of your systems and the underpinning. So, for example, when I first started working with these folks back in about 2018, 2019, it on average took them about four to five weeks to onboard their customers because everything was still very manual and tedious.

10:00Things like, hey, we need to go launch four EC2 instances. And it was somebody sitting at the console potentially and just manually doing these things. Yeah, maybe using a launch template here and there if it was similar enough. And now everything is automation by default. They're a Terraform shop. Everything is defined as code, checked into a centralized repository, various levels of QA and QC before anything gets done. They have a base operation template that they know is validated and good. They have automation built in to go out and pull the latest CIS-hardened images as applicable. If there's a specific compliance framework that needs to be complied to, they pull that out of their repository.

10:39repository and much like many of their customers and other partners in the space they're leveraging things like ec2 image builder into their pipelines to act off an sns notification to say all right cool we got a new update of this server 2019 ami with sequel baked into it that solves for the these handful of kbs go through pull it run it through their near prod environments make sure it's not going to blow something up that way at the next patent tuesday offer the customer the opt-in or the opt-out to go and do the thing automatically through use of SSM and SSM patch manager to effectively orchestrate the whole thing from start to finish so that all the customer has to do is either respond to an email or respond to a tick and say yes I want to do this or potentially postpone a couple clicks or a CLI command and that too is automated so that the only time that they ever touch a customer is if it's something that is both high value and something that is relevant to the customer's business problems that they're facing.

11:36Their goal is to never have to reach out to a customer and say, hey, look, your EC2 instance is down or, hey, I need to resmart LAMP or Apache. Is that cool if I go through and do that? Yeah. All the transactional stuff. This has always been the challenge is that I think, you know, roughly 80 % of IT time is spent on just maintenance, keeping the lights on and 20 % on the cool stuff. And the goal has always been to flip that script and automation gets you a long way there. Yeah, it does. Adrian, tell us a bit more. We've touched on Gen AI because, you know, that's what a lot of folks are talking about now.

12:10And I think what I've noticed is people say, well, that's great. I know you sort of can do things, but help me understand the deployment pattern that was used to solve a problem. You know, so what do they actually do? So in this case, you talked about the fact that this technology helped shrink that business process. Can you unpeel without giving away any sort of secret sauce what it looked like from an architectural perspective? So I'd be happy to talk about it from an architectural perspective. The underpinnings there was AWS Bedrock at the absolute core of it, leveraging both the Claude Haiku model as well as, I want to say it was Sonnet 3, I think is when they first started dorking around with it.

12:47I may be incorrect on that. But interestingly enough, it is as simple of a model as you can think of. If they are eating their own dog food, it's the exact same solution that they put out to customers. And I could definitely leave you a link there to the success story for this. So what they do is upon purchase, a customer is going out and launching a EKS cluster that is comprised of a couple of positive worker nodes that are going to spawn the processes and effectively the underpinnings of the chatbot that is going to be developed and dedicated to this customer for this specific instance. Behind that is going to be sitting a Weevy 8 database for the Vector Store with the customer having the full ability to either swap in.

13:30hey, I'm Postpre shop, we prefer to use Elastic, we're doing everything through DynamoDB. Whatever the individual case is, it's configurable enough to allow for the core source code to go through and leverage this. So the really interesting thing here is, at this point is where it starts getting kind of complex. What we're starting to see and what they saw, interestingly enough, was just pointing to S3 for object storage to hold the documents, to hold the XML, to hold for this particular instance, the raw invoicing of the customer usage reports of the CURS. It was good enough, but over time, as the bot became more and more intelligent and more performant, they realized object storage is good for the overall repository, but now we're having to start tiering storage.

14:17So they introduced a EFS layer in front of it to effectively serve as that intermediary to help determine and judge what type of usage, which customers, which accounts, which segments, where are we seeing the most churn and burn where we're starting to see the most interaction to help further on the back end reduce the cost of having to do the gets retrieves and pulls from archive if we have a customer that's asking for the same handful of things over and over again and in the middle of that transaction if the customer pulls up a browser and says i need to understand what the billing is for container services on this account in this region as the query goes out of bedrock and it goes through the architecture of VectorDB is going to plot out exactly where within the repository all of this information lives, comes and gets spits out.

15:03At that point, what really tripped them up was the inability to go out and ask additional questions. We hear a lot about multimodal, we hear a lot about multi-engagement, complex queries, that's exactly what it's talking about. Okay, great, tell me this, but I also need to know specifically EKS for the last 30 days, And that's where typically the rails would start falling off. So what they were able to do was leverage, built on AWS, of course, IBM's WatsonX agent platform. Using that in the way that it was set up finally gave them the ability to install that intuitive nature. Really, for the first time, let them get as complex or hyper-specific as they want to be able to further drill down and say, OK, but I need to know only on GPU-backed instances.

15:48I need to know G4DN. I need to understand in this region, in this availability zone, in this particular data center, or whatever the macro is that they're specifically trying to look for. That gets spit back out and presented back to the user on average in about under a second and a half in most instances, as opposed to having to open those, in some instances, 100 gig CSV files, either sitting on somebody's laptop or an S3 waiting for that to munch, running the query, getting the output, and then continuing to have to massage it. So just the simple laying that down and showing that back to the business was kind of revolutionary to them because they got used to, okay, third Friday of the month, we're going to start running invoicing and this kind of going to run through the weekend.

16:34Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. Maybe we have to restart a run. So when they started it at about noon on that Friday, and when it was done by like 1.30 for every one of their least 150 different customers that were leveraging, that they were in scope for this first run, they're just kind of besides themselves. I can't believe, I don't know what to do for this. It's almost like, did it work? Did it even run? Yeah, I'm sure it worked. They go check and they go, hey, this is different. This is liberating. This is not something that we were really thinking was within the realm of possibility. And as you may have mentioned before, the trust was there, the buy-in, like, all right, cool.

17:13We don't have to worry about this stuff. We know you folks are running it. But for us, it gives us that level of confidence to not only expand the scope, but you gave us back all of this time that we can either work to iterate on invoicing or do other things that are far more valuable than just kind of sitting here and babysitting a batch file. or get a long-running process and hope it doesn't time out. That's a great example of that direct benefit from a business standpoint. And Greg, let's come to you. So you're located, despite the New Zealand accent, you're in the great state of Texas in one of the world's most famous universities.

17:51Tell us the story of what your customer has done and how they changed organizational performance. yeah so Texas A &M is the one that I spend most of my time at these days and they've gone through a whole lot of change over the past few years it all really kicked off around about COVID coincidentally happened to be the same time with a lot of organizations funny how many places that's happened to yeah I mean I think it helped speed things up in a lot of ways but it was stemmed by a lot of leadership changes around consolidating their IT organization as a whole and sort of trying to get their arms around shadow IT and improving efficiencies and economies of scale and optimizing all their spend and all that kind of thing, but also driven by a cloud-first division.

18:34The CTO, who wasn't CTO when I started here, but has now moved into that role, he's our champion here. He's the one that helps us really drive everything. So all the tech organizations under him. And really that allows us to have that level of trust that we've built at that layer and sort of, you know, it filters down, down through the organization. And we take that trust out to the business as well and bring them in to start talking to IT about those business problems that you and Adrian have been just discussing, right? And help build that trust within that organization and overcome some of their previous baggage because it's public sector and there's always that kind of thing.

19:12But, you know, we did a couple of things. And one of the things that happened on, I think it was my third day in the field here, is we got an escalation. It's like, hey, we have to build a COVID dashboard for the university, right? Great. Okay, we're going to do that on QuickSight. We like QuickSight. Turns out QuickSight can't do, you know, couldn't at that time do public shared dashboards. Certainly can now. Yeah, certainly can now. And that's part of the reason why. Some of that. Customers needed it. Yeah. Some of that customer feedback made a way. Yeah. So we sat down with them and over the course of less than a week, there was one developer at the time on that team.

19:48I sat down and helped him build a serverless dashboard to take all that data. was still hosted in Athena and S3 and pulled from a RedCap database, which is sort of a server. It used to be a survey tool, came out of Vanderbilt. It's grown to a lot of other capabilities now. And we built that over the course of just a few days, sitting down doing some buddy programming, put a fully serverless. It was up and running within the timeframe that he was given, which was very, very short. And has, actually, I think it's still live, still serving the university and the county. And then because that was successful over a couple of days fully serverless, he was given the task of building the COVID vaccination scheduling system and reporting system for the Brazos County around Texas AM University.

20:36Now, we didn't hear about that until after the first failure, unfortunately, and you never want to be on the front page, right? So they came to us and we took a look at that with them and it was a pretty standard deployment backend on RDS and it was running in Elastic Beanstalk. actually. And we sat down with them and went through, overhauled that architecture. We brought in our specialists. We brought in a temporary TAM and we just overhauled the entire architecture. We optimized all of the database queries. We optimized the BRDS solution. We provided some feedback at the time because observability into RDS was not the greatest then for looking at slow running queries.

21:16Has significantly improved due to customer feedback like that. And they went from crashing instantly to being able to serve on their relaunch something along the lines of 48 ,000 unique customers in the first five minutes of that connectivity. And it did not go down again. And then that ran through COVID, several waves of vaccination releases and appointment scheduling and that kind of thing. And that was on the front end. And on the back end of that same application, they had the field side of it where they were actually doing the administration and the tracking and all the nurses in the field were logging in and administering the vaccinations and then tracking the vaccination administration there as well.

21:55So we went from a failure and front page news to absolutely perfect. And no one really knew it existed in the backend over the course of just a couple of weeks of that very tight timeframe where they had to relaunch. And that was something that helped us build a huge, huge amount of trust as a new team coming into the customer with them and allowed us to sort of branch out and talk to a lot of the other IT folks. But then that's been and gone, that's COVID. As we all know, COVID's gone now. We won't go there. But something that we've recently talked about and worked with the new team here as they've consolidated is around their website deployment hosting service.

22:37They used to host that on-premise and VMware on VMs and every website had its own VM stack and all the rest of it. It was all click ops. And it used to take them, if they were really, really lucky, and it wasn't a lot of work to be done, maybe it would take them some days, some days to deploy a website. Usually it was in the order of a couple of weeks from, hey, I need this website to it's going live. That resulted in some backlogs and some frustration and a lot more extra shadow IT. So working with their architecture team, we managed to get a fully serverless, almost fully serverless architecture.

23:13They still have their DNS on-prem, but at least that has an API so they can talk back to that. So they're using Lambda, Lambda at Edge, S3 for hosting, and CloudFront. And from the time that the marketing teams or the website development team approve the pull request in Git, it's now just a few minutes before that site is live. So we've gone from a couple of weeks to just a few minutes. and it is fully automated now. And all they need to do is train the teams how to commit to Git because that's a learning curve for sure. And it goes through and it validates the style sheets. It validates the specific templates they need to use.

23:54It runs a bunch of security checks in the pipeline. It uses GitHub and GitHub Actions primarily for that side of things before it pushes it out here. And then it deploys all the AWS infrastructure, again using terraform so they are a very very big terraform shop here so they're doing a lot it sounds like they focused on not clicking faster but actually sort of you got to step back and think about the problem again from that that outcome standpoint this was that you know we need websites up to service students and researchers and the university and we can't do it quickly yeah and once they shifted over their main university website it was very hard for you know departments and other folks to say oh well i don't really believe that's going to work because like well we're running our primary websites on this and it works fine you guys didn't even know right so it's there and that be able to prove again like you were saying eat your own dog food like we built this we run this we do this we recommend you do this as well and it will save you time and add value so what the the team here is really trying to do is given public sector it's not revenue generating but it is value generating they're trying to generate the value for the organization and multiply the value for the organization so it's a little bit of a different spin on that revenue generation standpoint while they are still technically across the end of they're trying to escape that moniker as well.

25:23Well, I guess they're trying to help the institution be more appealing to its potential attendees. You know, as any higher education wants to attract the best researchers, wants to attract the best students. And part of that is, well, what's my life like? You know, is the campus nice? Are the services good? And technology is now kind of front and centre in that because certainly the current generation of folks coming through, they expect a full digital, wonderful experience. They don't want clunkiness. They do. And they're also trying to get over some of the restrictions of, obviously, the state pay, right?

25:56I mean, they can't go out and pay the Amazons and the other big techs. So they have to really optimize their human resource time as well. So the investment into these technologies really allows them to go and innovate more and do more of these really cool optimization projects that they've been working on. So it sounds like if we think about thematically about what we've talked about today, really what we're saying is, A, automate as much as you can, because that actually frees your time from firefighting to actually having these conversations. Because the secret here is you have to talk to people.

26:34And as IT folks, and I speak personally, we don't always like talking to people. Like we've got into IT because we have these beautiful machines that we can issue commands to and stuff happens. But you've got to literally go and talk to people and probably people you don't normally speak to. And those people are likely to go, why are you talking to me? My computer's working. Why am I talking to you? And so you've got to change the conversation. You've got to earn some trust by showing stability in the environment to both demonstrate capability, but also to give you that mind space to do this more interesting stuff.

27:08Then you've got to ask really great open questions of, you know, what's the top three problems you have from a business process perspective? It can be as simple as what takes you the longest. That's key there because a lot of IT folks are used to defining a solution and then going out and dictating that solution to their constituents. And that does not build trust. So switching up their mindset and going out and asking them the actual business problems and the challenges they're trying to solve and then working backwards from there and building that solution. That changes things, and people don't expect that from IT most of the time.

27:43It is disarming. I'll vouch for that. It's almost confusing where they come out of that and say, did I just talk to an IT person? They don't expect us to approach with the business hat, approach it in that lens. And I haven't been, you know, fly on the wall in a couple of Greg's conversations with Texas A &M, despite the fact they may hold it against me that I'm a diehard Longhorn fan, but we won't go there. They appreciate profoundly approaching it in a business sense. What can we do for you? What are the type of things that bother you? What are the type of things that are on your plate? Changing the narrative and having that trust built with credibly and reliably having those systems up to perform it.