How DMP Automated Cloud Billing and Usage Reporting with Exivity
Data Management Professionals now generates billing and usage reports in minutes and seconds instead of hours and days. Founded in 2007, with 70 employees across 8 countries and over 500 customers, DMP replaced spreadsheet-based billing with automated metering, billing and per-customer cost insight — and extended the same approach to around 50 of its own clients.
Exivity enabled us to automate metered-based billing for dozens of customers. Using Exivity, we now generate reports on billing and usage in minutes and seconds as opposed to hours and days.
DMP
Data Management Professionals (DMP)
Customer story
Founded in 2007, Data Management Professionals (DMP) provides storage, data protection, and data management solutions to organizations across multiple markets.
With 70 employees operating across eight countries and a customer base of more than 500 organizations, DMP needed a more scalable way to manage billing while gaining clearer insight into customer consumption and costs.
The existing spreadsheet-based approach required significant manual effort to collect, transform, and process information. As the business grew, DMP needed to automate these processes and make usage and billing information available much faster.
Exivity provided the metering, cost visibility, and billing capabilities needed to support that transition.
Background
DMP and Exivity already had a close working relationship when the need for greater billing automation and cost visibility emerged.
The partnership was established in January 2018, making DMP one of the early adopters of Exivity.
Since then, Exivity has become part of DMP's approach to managing usage and billing data. DMP itself and approximately 50 of its clients have used Exivity to gain greater visibility into consumption and support their billing processes.
The challenge: moving beyond spreadsheet-based billing
DMP was using spreadsheets to visualize customer usage and associated costs.
Managing this information across more than 500 cloud customers created a significant operational burden.
Multiple employees could be involved in collecting data, transforming it into the required format, validating the information, and uploading it for further processing. The complexity and volume of data made this process time-consuming and introduced a greater risk of errors.
What worked as a manual process became increasingly difficult to sustain at scale.
DMP therefore needed to automate these business processes and dramatically reduce the time required to turn raw consumption information into useful billing and reporting data.
The goal was to move from processes that could take hours or days to reporting and billing workflows that could be completed in minutes or seconds.
What DMP needed
DMP identified several key requirements:
Clear insight into the usage of its data management platforms
Automated IT billing processes
Visibility into customer consumption and associated costs
Faster generation of usage and billing reports
A scalable approach that could support individual customer accounts
Exivity provided a way to bring usage and cost information together and transform it into structured financial and consumption reporting.
The results
Automated billing
One of the most important outcomes was the ability to move away from labor-intensive spreadsheet-based billing processes.
By automating the processing of usage and cost data, DMP could reduce the manual work involved in preparing customer billing information.
This enabled the company to process billing data more efficiently while reducing the risk of errors associated with repetitive manual tasks.
Faster reporting
Previously, collecting and preparing usage and billing information could take hours or even days.
With Exivity, those processes could be reduced to minutes or seconds, giving DMP much faster access to the information required for reporting and billing.
This allowed employees to spend less time manipulating spreadsheets and more time on higher-value activities.
Per-customer consumption visibility
Exivity gave DMP clearer insight into how its platforms and services were being consumed.
Rather than relying on aggregated or manually prepared spreadsheets, DMP could create clear overviews of consumption on a per-customer basis.
This provided a stronger foundation for both customer reporting and accurate usage-based billing.
Deployable across customer accounts
The solution could also be deployed at the individual account level, allowing DMP to extend the same approach to its customers.
Approximately 50 DMP clients have used Exivity, enabling consumption and cost visibility to be applied beyond DMP's own internal billing processes.
From spreadsheets to scalable billing
DMP's experience demonstrates a common challenge for growing cloud and managed service providers: spreadsheet-based processes can work initially, but become increasingly difficult to maintain as the number of customers, services, and data sources grows.
By replacing manual data processing with Exivity, DMP created a more scalable approach to metering, reporting, and billing.
The result was greater billing automation, faster reporting, clearer per-customer consumption visibility, and a model that could be extended across individual customer accounts.