Hornblower Cruises & Events

We worked with Tim Johnson, Director of IT at Hornblower Cruises & Events, on optimizing his AWS bill and controlling spend. We’ll let him tell you his story.

“AWS is a very dynamic service that allows you to spin resources up on-demand. But with eight business units each spinning up resources, you can really rack up the charges. We needed to identify what we were using and what business unit was using it to allow for better budgeting.

Corey came very highly recommended from people that we trust. My only hesitation was I wanted to make sure we would get the return on investment out of it in the longer term that we were looking for. Corey answered all my questions and gave excellent service from the get-go.

Corey analyzed our bill and gave us recommendations that required minimal engineering effort to implement. He helped us tag all of the resources within business units and set up a system to require certain criteria to be filled in whenever new AWS resources were spun up so we could continue to associate each resource with a particular business unit and be poised to get ROI over the long term.

Right out of the gate as a result of Corey’s work we could see one particular business unit was responsible for 60% of the charges. So instead of splitting the bill evenly between units, we can more accurately allocate those charges and bill each unit for exactly what they use with documentation to back it up – allowing them to budget, forecast and plan better. Now that we know exactly what each business unit spends in AWS, we can plan with far greater accuracy and pre-purchase resources at a reduced price. That allows us to trim the bill by 20-30%.

Tim Johnson, Director of IT, Hornblower Cruises & Events

You can get AWS consulting from just about anywhere here in San Francisco. But with Corey, you get white-glove, concierge level, bend-over backwards service and excellent communication. You pay for results with a one-time fee, regardless of what it takes on his side. You know exactly what it’s going to cost and what you’re going to get out of it instead of eating hourly consulting fees. That’s a lot of peace of mind. The eventual cost savings and SOWs were very clearly defined, so we knew what success would look like right from the start. He has a personality that’s second to none and there’s always positivity with him. That’s why I work with him over anybody else.”