Like many seasoned finance executives, Damon Fletcher saw Snowflake as a game-changer in cloud-based data management. While a senior finance executive at Tableau, he championed its adoption, recognizing its ability to scale analytics and streamline enterprise data operations. But he also discovered a challenge familiar to many finance leaders—the hidden costs that come with cloud consumption-based pricing.
At Tableau, Fletcher tells us, the company’s Snowflake costs grew exponentially, mirroring a broader trend in tech where companies struggle to control cloud spend. This realization led Fletcher beyond the CFO office. In 2023, he co-founded Caliper, a company dedicated to bringing greater cost transparency and AI-powered efficiency to cloud spending.
Expand TitleFletcher tells us that AI is central to Caliper’s approach. The platform leverages machine learning forecasting to predict cloud usage trends and generative AI to surface actionable cost-saving recommendations. Today, Fletcher says Caliper provides deep insights across Snowflake, AWS, and Datadog, allowing finance and DevOps teams to pinpoint inefficiencies in real time.
“At Tableau, I wasn’t just managing finance—I was working closely with IT, sales, and product teams. That broader exposure helped prepare me for the CEO role. … The biggest mindset shift from CFO to CEO? You have to go beyond just managing the numbers—you have to build the vision.” —Damon Fletcher, CEO, Caliper (Former CFO Tableau, DataRobot)
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CFOTL: What does Caliper do, and what are its offerings today?
Fletcher: Many legacy cloud cost management tools, such as Cloudability and CloudHealth, were primarily designed to help companies track public cloud spending. They focused on dashboards, reporting, and reserved instance modeling, but their capabilities were often limited to cloud infrastructure.
What we’re doing at Caliper is fundamentally different. Our platform is analytics-driven, allowing companies to deeply explore their cloud cost and usage data. We’re expanding beyond public cloud cost tracking to address emerging risks in third-party tools like Snowflake, Datadog, and Databricks—areas where there have been few, if any, cost management solutions available.
Read MoreOur goal is to put real-time, actionable data at the fingertips of engineers and finance teams, enabling them to optimize cloud spend more effectively. We’re also approaching this in a disruptive way. While some competitors charge companies $200,000 or more, we offer a more affordable, per-seat pricing model, typically $20,000 to $25,000 per engagement. This significantly reduces the cost of cloud cost management tools while delivering what we believe is a superior user experience.
With Caliper, we’re not just tracking costs—we’re helping companies proactively manage and optimize their cloud investments.
Caliper wwww.calipersoftware.ai Newton, MA