Our Partner Discovery Story－Vantage

—How we discovered Vantage and built the partnership to bring it to the Japanese market—

As the migration of enterprise systems to the cloud progresses, the questions of how to control costs and how to translate them into value are once again coming to the fore. However, a culture and framework for optimizing cloud spending—viewing it across the entire organization not merely as a cost to be cut but as an investment that generates value—have yet to take root in Japan.

Against this backdrop, K.K. Ashisuto (Ashisuto) turned its attention to "Vantage"—a US-based FinOps^※ platform that visualizes costs across multiple clouds (such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and so on) and SaaS applications on a single dashboard, thereby facilitating informed management decisions. Ashisuto is now working alongside Vantage to pioneer the Japanese market in this sector.

Why did Ashisuto choose Vantage in the FinOps sector—a market still largely untapped in Japan? What kind of challenge is the company undertaking? Here is the story of the initiative’s launch, told as an internal corporate incubation project.

In recent years, cloud adoption has become mainstream among many companies, and the use of multi-cloud environments is no longer uncommon. Furthermore, the use of SaaS solutions—from data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks to monitoring tools such as Datadog—has become widespread.

As the user base for cloud and SaaS grows, providers' infrastructure costs rise accordingly—making usage-based pricing all but unavoidable, rather than a flat-fee model. This has drawn attention to management challenges, such as the difficulty of managing budgets under usage-based pricing and the escalation of cloud costs with increasing usage.

Cloud costs are often managed at the departmental or project level, and because pricing structures and billing formats vary by cloud vendor, optimizing and accurately allocating costs is difficult. In addition, manual aggregation using Excel or spreadsheets is labor-intensive. A major challenge is the lack of visibility—not just within individual units but across the entire organization—regarding total expenditure, areas of waste, and where investments should be directed.

It defeats the very purpose of adopting the cloud—which is to strengthen and expand business operations with agility and speed—if usage stalls due to cost concerns, ultimately slowing down business growth. Against this backdrop, a framework known as "FinOps" is gaining traction overseas. It represents a cultural shift that reframes cloud costs not merely as expenses to be cut but as investments that generate value through visibility, fostering a collaborative approach in which finance, management, and IT teams work together to optimize spending.

While FinOps is a field that has begun to attract attention in Japan, companies facing difficulties with organization-wide cost management need a partner who understands the true nature of the challenges and works alongside them to co-create value. Ashisuto decided to take on the challenge of entering this space because we believe we can fulfill that role.

The "Innovation Co-Creation Lab^※" (hereinafter referred to as "iLab") is a division with the mission of identifying new technologies and business opportunities that will drive Ashisuto's future growth, and transforming them into viable businesses through co-creation.

At iLab, we monitor international media and reports daily, compiling information on startups and products that could serve as seeds for future business ventures in our proprietary research database. While we identify over 1,000 potential candidates annually, the team engages in extensive discussion to narrow this vast pool down to approximately 300 items. We then evaluate whether these candidates could become products offered by Ashisuto in the future, using our own unique set of criteria.

Reports from research firms consistently cite "cost management" as a key challenge for IT departments. Against this backdrop, Masuyuki Honda—who is responsible for technical validation at iLab—began noticing the term "FinOps" appearing frequently in overseas media and various documents around March 2024, prompting him to investigate it.

At the time, there were around 30 to 40 FinOps startups worldwide, and numerous products promised cost management for the three major public clouds—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Amid this landscape, Honda took note of "Vantage," a solution that supported not only Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) but also a wide range of middleware SaaS offerings, including Snowflake, Databricks, and Datadog.

Furthermore, Honda closely examined Vantage's development background and features from a technical perspective and highly rated the following points.

Just then, news arrived that VNTG, Inc. —the company behind Vantage—had launched a partner program. iLab promptly contacted the company. While simultaneously evaluating factors such as market needs and business compatibility, the team decided that Ashisuto would first use Vantage itself. Upon visualizing costs within its own AWS environment, the team discovered areas where expenses were higher than anticipated; experiencing the tool's value firsthand deepened their conviction that it would be highly beneficial for their customers as well.

Shinnosuke Matsuyama of iLab (currently at Ashisuto AI Terrace), who later worked with the client to develop a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Vantage, recalls that time as follows:

Ashisuto also looks beyond the product itself, business compatibility, and feasibility to one more factor: whether the partner can be trusted—both as individuals and as a company.

In the autumn of 2024, Aki Tateyama from iLab considered attending "FinOps X Europe"—an event hosted by the FinOps Foundation in Barcelona, Spain—to explore the latest trends in the field. Through her communications with Vantage, she learned that the company's CEO and CTO would also be attending.
However, the event was a closed gathering restricted to exhibiting vendors and FinOps Foundation members. Under normal circumstances, she might have given up on attending, but she refused to let that stop her.

Since the appointment wasn't confirmed, there were moments of anxiety when the individuals didn't show up at the requested meeting time. Yet, with nothing to go on but their LinkedIn profile photos, she patiently waited—and finally succeeded in meeting them—and was even invited to the Vantage business meeting booth at the event venue as their "first customer."

During discussions at the meeting booth, Vantage’s two founders shared the following sentiments:

"We want to address the issue of cloud costs that are exorbitant yet insufficiently managed."
"We want to help unlock more value from the cloud."
"To achieve this, we need not only technology but also long-term relationships of trust with our customers."

At the time, Vantage did not appear to be considering expansion into Asia or a full-scale entry into the Japanese market. However, as Tateyama carefully explained who Ashisuto was and the potential of the Japanese market, a shared vision emerged: "Let's create Japan's first FinOps success story together."

While engaging in ongoing dialogue with Vantage, Ashisuto also featured FinOps as the main theme at "S.E.E.D.S.," an invitation-only event regularly hosted by iLab. S.E.E.D.S. is an initiative that focuses on outstanding software and technologies not yet introduced or widely adopted in Japan; it fosters co-creation among user companies, startups, and Ashisuto to validate these solutions and explore their potential for commercialization.

Subsequently, S.E.E.D.S. led to opportunities to connect with multiple clients, and a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Vantage was launched, spearheaded by Shinnosuke Matsuyama of iLab, along with Toshikazu Nakamura and Yuki Yoshida from the System Infrastructure Technology Division.

In the PoC phase, Ashisuto provided hands-on support for scenarios such as integrating Vantage into large-scale multi-cloud environments, as well as into existing cost management processes and complex cost allocation rules that customers had previously handled using Excel or standard cloud service tools.

For instance, while spreadsheets allow for the detailed tracking of "business context" (such as management IDs and background information related to cost management), Vantage excels at providing visibility from an IT infrastructure perspective—showing, for example, exactly which cloud accounts and servers (or services) are incurring specific costs. As a result, some tasks that were previously handled in spreadsheets can no longer be replicated exactly as before.

Currently, following validation through PoCs, an increasing number of cases are proceeding to paid adoption with the mindset of "let's give Vantage a try from scratch."

Out of the more than 1,000 research leads gathered annually, only two or three are ultimately adopted as official Ashisuto products. Furthermore, even after a product is identified as a candidate, it may take several years before sales actually begin if the necessary conditions are not met.

In Vantage's case, the decision to officially adopt the product was driven by several factors: iLab’s early recognition of the emerging FinOps trend and its proactive research; the insights gained into customer reactions and market potential through initiatives like S.E.E.D.S. and PoCs; and the strong backing of executive leadership, who had heard firsthand from customers about the challenges surrounding cloud cost management. Consequently, the formal decision to handle the product was made a year and a half after iLab first identified its potential.

Since officially becoming a Vantage reseller, Ashisuto has received inquiries about Vantage from several major companies, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The primary points of contact are Toshikazu Nakamura and Yuki Yoshida, both of whom have managed multiple Proof of Concept (PoC) projects. Through their interactions with these clients, they have gained the following insights:

On the other hand, there are cases where dialogue with the client fails to progress. One contributing factor is whether the company has an organization or role responsible for cross-departmental oversight and overall optimization.

The FinOps market is still relatively untapped in Japan. There may not be clear answers to questions like, "Why should we do this now?" or "How much should we invest?" However, Nakamura, who continues to propose FinOps solutions to clients, views FinOps as follows:

The goal is to accurately visualize cloud costs and enable management and operations teams to collaborate to identify waste and determine where to increase investment. Vantage and Ashisuto play a significant role in supporting this process.

Ashisuto also has the right foundation to incubate such initiatives on the ground.

Ashisuto is committed to sharing the stories that emerge from this process, as they provide valuable insights for our customers.