A mid-market financial services firm managing $12 billion in assets under management had grown its AWS cloud footprint rapidly over three years, reaching $18M in annual AWS spend across two AWS accounts. The infrastructure supported core trading platforms, risk analytics, client reporting, and data warehousing workloads — all running across a mix of on-demand instances, some ad hoc Reserved Instances, and a small number of Savings Plans purchased without a coordinated strategy.
Despite the scale of spend, the firm had no formal AWS Enterprise Discount Programme agreement. AWS's account team had raised the possibility of an EDP twice over the prior 18 months, but internal IT and procurement leadership had not advanced the conversation — partly due to uncertainty about the commitment requirements, and partly because the AWS account team had not presented an EDP structure that felt commercially attractive relative to the existing on-demand pricing relationship.
The firm's CFO commissioned a cloud cost review after a quarterly AWS bill exceeded $1.8M — $400K above forecast — due to a combination of a compute scaling event and over-provisioned database instances that had not been right-sized in over a year. IT Negotiations was engaged to conduct an emergency cloud cost audit, develop a structured commitment strategy, and negotiate a formal EDP with AWS.
"We were large enough to have real leverage with AWS, but we had never used it. The relationship was entirely on their terms. The idea that we could negotiate a 33% reduction in six weeks was frankly difficult to believe before we saw it happen."
— CFO, Financial Services Firm (identity protected)IT Negotiations deployed a senior cloud commercial specialist with prior experience as an AWS Enterprise Account Manager. The engagement ran across two parallel tracks: an immediate cost optimisation workstream and a concurrent EDP negotiation workstream — deliberately keeping both live simultaneously to create negotiating leverage.
Track 1 — Cloud Cost Audit and Immediate Optimisation. We analysed 90 days of AWS Cost Explorer data across both accounts, applying a workload classification methodology to identify on-demand spend eligible for commitment-based discounts. We identified $3.2M in annual on-demand compute and RDS spend that was consistently running at high utilisation — ideal Savings Plans candidates. We built a Savings Plans purchasing recommendation that the client could execute immediately, independently of any EDP negotiation, delivering immediate discounts of 24–40% on qualifying compute spend without any long-term commitment risk. This gave the client an immediate cost reduction path and reduced urgency around the EDP timeline — useful negotiating positioning with AWS.
Track 2 — EDP Structuring and Negotiation. We built an independent consumption forecast model based on the client's 24-month AWS spend trajectory, workload growth plans, and planned infrastructure migrations. This gave us a defensible commitment baseline for EDP negotiations — one that was conservative enough to eliminate commitment risk while large enough to unlock AWS's upper EDP discount tiers.
We engaged directly with AWS's commercial deal desk, bypassing the standard account team process to engage the regional enterprise sales director directly — a level of escalation that unlocks higher discount authority within AWS's approval structure. We presented our benchmark data on comparable EDP deals in the financial services sector, making clear we had independently verified what "good" looked like on a deal of this size.
The EDP negotiation covered three components: (1) a tiered EDP discount structure starting at 23% on all AWS spend within the commitment level, escalating to 28% above the minimum commitment; (2) negotiated migration credits of $480K applicable to workload migrations within the first 18 months; and (3) AWS Support pricing negotiated at a rate representing a 20% discount on standard Enterprise Support fees. For more on our approach to cloud contract negotiations, see our AWS advisory service and our cloud cost optimisation capability.
The combined impact of Savings Plans optimisation and the negotiated EDP delivered $6M in year-one savings against the firm's prior $18M AWS spend run rate — a 33% reduction. The breakdown:
The EDP runs for three years with a minimum annual spend commitment of $13.5M — a level the firm was confident in meeting based on our consumption modelling. The agreement includes a formal review mechanism at 18 months that allows commitment level adjustment based on actual consumption, providing a contractual safety valve the firm's CFO had specifically requested.
The firm has since implemented a formal FinOps practice — including dedicated cloud cost governance, weekly spend reviews, and a commitment coverage target of 75% — informed by the Cloud FinOps Maturity Model from IT Negotiations' free white paper. The CFO described the engagement as "the fastest ROI of any advisory engagement we have commissioned."
"Six million dollars in twelve months, from a six-week engagement. The EDP structure gave us predictability we didn't have before. The Savings Plans work gave us immediate savings we didn't know were available. Both were outcomes of having someone who knew how to play AWS at their own game."
— CFO, Financial Services Firm (identity protected)At $5M+ in annual AWS spend you have significant EDP leverage you may not be using. Our cloud advisory team knows exactly what discount levels are achievable at your spend tier — and how to negotiate them. Book a free 30-minute consultation.
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