Company Profile

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a dynamic, growing business unit within Amazon.com. AWS is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help organizations scale and grow. Millions of customers, from AirBnB to MLB, trust AWS Cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

Business Situation

As a brief overview, TM1 is a robust financial planning & analytics platform that is extremely flexible and scalable. Amazon has been successfully using TM1 for high-level financial planning and consolidation for the entire corporate entity for four years. In addition, over the last three plus years, CarpeDatum has architected and developed a number of TM1 solutions for Amazon Web Services including; detailed expense and capital planning for their computing infrastructure, sophisticated capacity planning, detailed usage and revenue planning, consolidated P&L’s for SEC reporting, and a sophisticated cost allocation system that allows AWS to generate P&L’s for 50+ different products.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the AWS management team within finance, has a created a financial performance management system known as AWSFPM (AWS Financial Performance Management). AWSFPM standardizes, streamlines, and integrates the activities of financial planning, analysis, and reporting into one complete system. AWSFPM provides flexible multi-year budgeting, planning, and forecasting of AWS financials and key metrics.

The AWS Infrastructure team who’s in charge of the computing infrastructure for both AWS and the entire Amazon.com has also implemented a large TM1 system. This system helps manage all of the operational and capital costs associated with building out the entire computing infrastructure. Some of its core features are described below.

• Revenue/Usage
• Capacity/Demand Planning
• Opex (driver-based)- Capex & Depreciation Models
• Racks/Servers- Data Centers
• Network- Cost Assignment (Allocations)
• Metrics
• Product Profitability

Technical Situation

Amazon has over 20 TM1 instances and has 14 developers. The development cycle is continuous and very fast paced. Identifying all of the changes between environments and managing the promotion process was becoming very complicated and time consuming. The solution? TM1Compare!