Software acquirers spent the first half of 2026 bidding prices back up. Kroll's August 17 sector update has the year tracking toward the second-highest deal count on record, with the median strategic buyer paying 6.0 times trailing revenue: six dollars today for every dollar the target earned in the past year. Everything sold at those multiples runs on rented infrastructure, and the economics underneath are moving the other way. Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud report, released March 18, found companies wasting 29% of their cloud spend, the first rise in five years: nearly one infrastructure dollar in three now buys nothing at all. A company sold at that price is sold together with its cloud bill. Someone inside has to make that bill worth reading.
Serhii Matiushchenko has spent more than 20 years becoming that someone. A Senior Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce, he started in corporate networks in Kharkiv in the early 2000s, grew through Ciklum from network engineering into DevOps and cloud work, and from May 2021 led the platform team on Zoomin Software, the unstructured-data company Salesforce would later acquire. His working definition of the job has stayed narrow: keep the system stable and measurable, and keep its costs explainable to someone who was not in the room when they were incurred.
That definition was formed before the cloud turned infrastructure into an abstraction on an invoice. Matiushchenko joined Ciklum in 2013 as a network engineer, earned his Cisco CCNA, and rebuilt the Kharkiv office's Wi-Fi and the network core behind it. The company-wide step, linking the separate offices into one network, backup providers included, was a team effort, and the complaint volume dropped once the offices ran as one. His teams also supported projects on a homegrown cloud of physical servers in a rented OVH data center, and its instability taught a lesson he has repeated since: not all data centers are equally reliable, and reliability is a cost line whether or not anyone prices it. In 2016 he moved into DevOps, took up Docker and container orchestration, collected AWS certifications, and by 2019 was a tech lead on AWS.
“Every certification I took closed a loop,” he says. “The CCNA put a system under things I had learned with my hands, and the AWS ones did the same for the cloud later. You collect them so your decisions have a framework.”
In May 2021 Matiushchenko became AWS tech lead for Zoomin Software, a Ciklum client, and the inheritance was thankless: unstable infrastructure, a heavy load of manual operations, and a team of two. One resignation would have put the platform in trouble. Critical issues, the kind that wake people at night and stop customers mid-task, fell by at least half within the first three months. Results like that never make a press release, and they decide everything downstream, because a platform that has stopped burning frees its people to build again. Over the following year deployments were automated and processes matured into something a new hire could follow, and the team grew from those two engineers to eight under his lead.
“The first quarter was mostly discipline, honestly,” says Matiushchenko, who ran the project as tech lead first and team lead later. “Stabilize first, measure everything, take responsibility for the outcome rather than the circumstances. A platform you are still firefighting, you cannot optimize it, and you certainly cannot put a price on it.”
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he relocated to the United States. In 2023, Zoomin bought out his contract with Ciklum so the work could continue directly. The first major initiative in his new role was SOC 2, an independent examination that enterprise customers increasingly treat as an entry ticket: no report, no contract. Preparing for it required rethinking security across the entire infrastructure; his team delivered the infrastructure portion of the work, and the company successfully completed the SOC 2 attestation. He sees that attestation as a translation of engineering maturity into a language lawyers and enterprise buyers can understand without an interpreter.
Then the product and the client base grew, and the AWS bill grew faster than either. The answer was a full analysis of the entire environment followed by a series of optimizations that cut it by at least 30% while keeping reliability and performance where they were. Hold that next to the industry's own scorecard: the average company, by Flexera's count, wastes a share of cloud spend almost that large, year after year, without ever seeing it itemized.
“The bill is a symptom,” he explains. “I started in networks, so I read a system the way you trace a packet, hop by hop, layer by layer, and the waste usually sits two layers below where the finance report points. We went through the whole environment before we touched a single server, and the savings held because the architecture held.”
By then his standards had begun traveling without him. Pipeline designs his teams built were picked up on other projects and kept delivering elsewhere, and so were their infrastructure-as-code practices, the written standards another team could adopt wholesale. Back at Ciklum he had also authored the network module for the company's internal DevOps training course, the one used to select stronger candidates, and ran technical interviews, many of them, for teams beside his own. A person in that seat is effectively setting the bar for who gets hired to run infrastructure across a firm staffing projects for international clients.
Cost engineers have been turning up in rooms once reserved for bankers and lawyers: the FinOps Foundation's sixth annual survey notes its practitioners being pulled into strategic negotiations and M&A technology due diligence. At the end of 2024 his own platform went through that kind of reading. Salesforce acquired Zoomin; Israeli business press reported the deal at about $450 million, above the company's last private valuation, while Salesforce itself did not disclose terms, folding Zoomin's specialty into its AI-agent platform, Agentforce: making documentation and support content, what the industry calls unstructured data, usable for AI systems. The buyer's own announcement called Zoomin's expertise and technology proven. Matiushchenko keeps his personal claim on that outcome modest; the DevOps team's work played a real part, he believes, and he leaves the sizing to others. By the time the deal closed, the platform had completed its SOC 2 examination and was operating at a substantially lower cloud cost.
Inside Salesforce the scale changed and so did the bottleneck. The contractor team did not transfer with the acquisition, so the Salesforce side had to be built up from scratch, which made structured knowledge transfer and onboarding a core part of the role, alongside consolidating accounts, automating incident response and folding AI tools into routine operations. Beneath those tasks sits a quieter one: keeping the architecture consistent while the company changes around it. There is a symmetry in that. His first job, in the early 2000s, was teaching computer literacy at a sports academy in Kharkiv while rebuilding its network; more than two decades later, at one of the world's largest software companies, the hardest part of the work is once again standing at a whiteboard explaining how a system fits together, with the psychology and pedagogy he once studied now doing steady work.
Kroll expects buyers to keep paying premiums for software with durable double-digit growth and a believable AI story. PwC's mid-year outlook for the sector expects the distance between AI-resilient and AI-exposed businesses to keep growing. The sorting happens in places no keynote mentions: invoices and audit reports.
“Run your infrastructure as if due diligence starts next quarter,” Matiushchenko advises. “I tell younger engineers this all the time. Learn something new when the chance comes up. Keep the stack at your fingertips. Keep the costs explainable line by line to a person who has never met you and never will. A buyer reads exactly that. And that's also just good engineering.”