CloudZero — Proof of Value Plan

POV Plan

Technical Scoping

Deal Overview

Company

Primary evaluator(s)

Executive sponsor

CloudZero AE

CloudZero SE

Cloud spend

POV timeline

Problem Statements & Business Outcomes

Current state, business impact, and desired solution — written in the prospect's language. Remove unused blocks.

Current state

Impact

Desired solution

Current state

Impact

Desired solution

Current state

Impact

Desired solution

Success Criteria

[Account] will consider the POV successful when all criteria below are demonstrated. Each maps to a problem above.

Criteria	What this means for [account]	Metric / target	Tied to	Status
Cost allocation	Allocate ≥90% of cloud spend to specific products, teams, and environments — including shared infrastructure.	≥90% of total spend to top [N] product lines	O1	Not started
Unit economics	Map true infrastructure cost to [customers / transactions / API calls]. Identify highest-cost segments with margin analysis.	Cost-per-[unit] for top [N] accounts	O2	Not started
Anomaly detection	Automatically detect cost spikes at the service, account, and team level — within hours, not weeks.	Detect a simulated spike same business day	O3	Not started
Waste & savings	Identify annualized savings with dollar impact per recommendation — enough to justify the investment.	≥$[X]K annualized savings identified	O3	Not started
Dashboards	Real-time dashboards for [engineering / finance / exec] personas with spend by product, team, and environment.	[N] persona dashboards delivered	O1–O3	Not started

POV Activity Plan

Update dates before sharing. Commercial: 2 weeks. Enterprise: 4 weeks. All working sessions are 60 minutes.

Target date	Activity	Stakeholders	Status
[Date −7d]	Pre-POV: finalize success criteria & sign-off	AE, Champion, Exec Sponsor	Not started
[Kickoff]	POV kickoff: account connection & data onboarding	Champion, DevOps, SE	Not started
[+3–5d]	Working session 1: cost allocation configuration	Champion, SE	Not started
[+7–9d]	Working session 2: unit economics & customer mapping	Champion, Finance Lead, SE	Not started
[+11–13d]	Working session 3: anomaly detection, dashboards & savings	Champion, DevOps, SE	Not started
[End POV]	Value & ROI review	Champion, AE, SE	Not started
[+5d]	POV wrap-up: executive presentation	Exec Sponsor, Champion, AE	Not started

Roles & Responsibilities

CloudZero will:

Provide a trial environment for the duration of the POV

Commit technical resources (SE) for all working sessions

Demonstrate each use case within the [Account] environment

Deliver a Value & Savings Report at end of POV

Provide executive presentation summarizing POV outcomes

[Account] will:

Configure cloud billing access before kickoff (CUR, billing exports)

Commit to at least one working session per week

Complete technical scoping before kickoff

Provide Kubernetes agent deployment access (if applicable)

Ensure exec sponsor attends the wrap-up presentation

Use Cases in Scope

Check each bucket that applies. Sub-use-cases and required technical questions expand automatically.

Reduce Risk from Uncontrolled Cloud Spend

Cost attribution, efficient growth, automated reporting

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Enable Cost Attribution

Allocate cloud & AI costs to teams, products, environments, or customers.

Granular Cost Mapping

Cost sources in scope

AWSAzureGCPKubernetesSnowflakeOpenAI / AnthropicDatabricks

Flexible Attribution Engine

Primary allocation method

Shared cost allocation needed?

Drive Efficient Growth & Predictable Innovation

Monitor how spend scales with business growth to spot when costs outpace value.

Spend dimensions needed

Product lineEngineering teamCustomerFeatureEnvironmentBusiness unitCost center

Business metric for growth efficiency

Prevent Manual Reporting Errors

Automate reporting and forecasting to eliminate manual spreadsheet processes.

Current reporting process

How are unexpected costs found today?

Alert routing

SlackEmailPagerDutyJiraServiceNowTeams

Minimize Waste

Optimization, anomaly detection, commitment management

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Optimize Cloud, SaaS/IaaS & AI Infrastructure

Identify inefficient resources across all providers to optimize usage.

Automated Waste Detection

Where does the team suspect waste exists today?

Idle / stopped EC2Oversized instancesOrphaned EBS volumesUnused load balancersDev environments left runningDuplicate SaaS tools

Team-Centric Optimization

Who owns optimization decisions?

Target savings goal (if known)

Detect Anomalies

Surface unexpected AI and cloud cost spikes with real-time alerts.

Highest-risk services for spikes

EC2 autoscalingData transferLambdaRDSS3AI / LLM API callsKubernetes

Known recent incidents

Manage Commitment-Based Discounts

Track and optimize reserved instances, savings plans, and other commitments.

Current commitment coverage

Upcoming commitment renewals (if known)

Maximize Profit

Unit economics, cost per customer, margin improvement

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Understand Unit Economics

Drill into cost per customer, per product, or per feature to assess pricing strategies.

Unit Economics Trend Analysis

What is the unit?

CustomerTransactionAPI callSurveyUserFeatureSubscription tier

Data source for the unit metric

Reduce Cost Per Customer

Identify where expensive resources impact specific offerings to enable more efficient architectures.

Top cost-driving services per customer workload

Compute (EC2 / VMs)Database (RDS / Cosmos)Storage (S3 / Blob)Data transferAI / LLM tokensKubernetes pods

Are there specific high-cost customers suspected?

Maximize Customer Margin

Identify high-cost, low-margin customers and make product or pricing adjustments.

Integrated Cost & Revenue Attribution

Is revenue data available to combine with cost?

Key business decision this enables

Scoping Summary

Select use cases above — confirmed answers will appear here as a pre-kickoff checklist.

Pre-POV Readiness Checklist

NDA fully executed
Executive sponsor identified and engaged
Risk: deal stalls at wrap-up if exec not engaged early.
Cloud account access confirmed (AWS CUR · Azure billing export · GCP BigQuery)
Use cases selected and technical scoping completed above
Kubernetes agent deployment plan confirmed (if in scope)
Calendar invites sent for all working sessions
Commercial process documented: approval chain, security, procurement, legal
Success criteria signed off by champion and exec sponsor