Cloud spend has become one of the largest and fastest-growing line items in enterprise IT budgets. For most organisations, 30–40% of cloud spend is unnecessary — a combination of over-provisioned commitments, on-demand usage where committed pricing would apply, under-optimised savings plans, and commercial agreements negotiated without benchmark data. We provide independent cloud cost optimisation and FinOps advisory that addresses both the commercial negotiation and the operational discipline — delivering average savings of 35% across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud engagements.
Cloud providers have built commercial models that are extraordinarily effective at growing customer spend — through consumption pricing, commitment mechanics, and service proliferation that creates organic cost growth even as you deliver more value. Understanding these mechanisms is the first step to controlling them.
Cloud providers make on-demand pricing the default — maximum flexibility, maximum cost. Committed use discounts of 30–70% are available for most compute, storage, and database services, but require explicit commitment. Most organisations have a significant proportion of predictable workloads running on on-demand pricing when committed alternatives would deliver substantial savings without meaningful flexibility sacrifice.
Organisations that have made cloud commitments — AWS Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Azure Reserved VM Instances, or Google CUDs — frequently find that commitment allocation is mismatched to actual usage. Over-committed services waste money; under-committed workloads pay on-demand rates. We analyse commitment coverage and restructure portfolios to maximise discount utilisation.
AWS Enterprise Discount Programme (EDP) and Azure Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) are enterprise-level spend commitments that unlock significant commercial terms — but committing the wrong amount at the wrong tier creates either under-utilisation waste or excessive penalty exposure. We model optimal commitment levels and negotiate EDP/MACC structures that balance discount depth with financial flexibility.
Cloud platforms offer thousands of services — each with its own pricing model, commitment structure, and optimisation opportunity. Most organisations have limited visibility into their full cloud service consumption and no systematic process for identifying and eliminating waste. We deliver a comprehensive cloud spend analysis that identifies every optimisation opportunity across your full cloud footprint.
Cloud provider support plans — AWS Enterprise Support, Azure Unified Support, Google Cloud Premium Support — are priced as a percentage of total cloud spend and can represent $500K–$5M+ annually for large customers. These plans are negotiable, their scope is frequently over-purchased, and third-party alternatives exist for many components. We evaluate support plan value and negotiate terms that reflect your actual support consumption.
Commercial optimisation is most effective when supported by ongoing FinOps governance — tagging policies, showback/chargeback models, anomaly detection, and budget accountability. Without this operational foundation, cost savings from commercial negotiation erode within months as organic spend growth resumes unchecked. We design FinOps operating models that make cost management a continuous capability.
Our cloud practice covers commercial negotiation, commitment optimisation, FinOps operating model design, and ongoing cost governance — across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
We negotiate AWS Enterprise Discount Programme agreements — commitment level, discount tier, eligible service scope, and contractual protections. Our EDP benchmark database covers 50+ completed AWS enterprise agreements. We ensure your EDP commitment is sized correctly, your discount depth reflects market rates, and your agreement includes appropriate guardrails against over-commitment exposure.
Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments are negotiated within the context of your broader Microsoft EA. We assess your Azure spending trajectory, determine optimal MACC commitment levels, integrate MACC structure with your M365 and Copilot licensing, and negotiate commercial terms that maximise discount value without creating over-commitment risk.
Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts deliver 37–55% savings on compute compared to on-demand pricing. We analyse your GCP workload portfolio, model optimal commitment structures across Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and other services, and negotiate Google Cloud agreements that maximise CUD value while maintaining the flexibility your DevOps and data teams need.
For organisations with existing cloud commitments, we analyse coverage against actual usage — identifying mismatches between committed and consumed services, recommending exchanges or modifications where available, and restructuring commitment portfolios to maximise discount utilisation across the full cloud estate.
We analyse your cloud billing data to identify waste — idle resources, oversized instances, orphaned storage, unused commitments, redundant data transfer, and over-provisioned databases. This analysis typically identifies 15–25% of current cloud spend as immediately eliminatable waste, providing quick wins alongside the medium-term savings from commercial negotiation.
We design FinOps operating models that make cloud cost management a sustainable capability — establishing tagging policies, showback/chargeback frameworks, budget anomaly detection, and governance processes that maintain cost discipline as cloud usage grows. FinOps maturity is the difference between one-time savings and permanent cost control.
We deliver cloud cost optimisation across all major cloud platforms and cloud-adjacent services.
EDP negotiation, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Marketplace private offers, support plan optimisation, and AWS billing analysis.
MACC optimisation, Azure Reserved VM Instances, Savings Plans, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and integration with M365 EA commercial strategy.
CUD negotiation, Workspace licensing, Vertex AI committed use, BigQuery capacity pricing, and Google Cloud support plan optimisation.
Enterprises running workloads across multiple cloud providers benefit from a coordinated commercial strategy — using each provider's competitive interest in growing their footprint to negotiate better terms from all of them.
Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB Atlas, Elastic Cloud — cloud-adjacent SaaS platforms with their own consumption pricing models and committed use structures that require the same analytical and commercial approach as hyperscaler optimisation.
On-premise infrastructure costs, private cloud licensing (VMware, OpenStack), and hybrid cloud commercial strategy — ensuring your full infrastructure portfolio is commercially optimised.
An enterprise SaaS company spending $16M annually on AWS had an EDP approaching renewal. Their existing EDP had been negotiated 3 years earlier without specialist support and was structured at commitment levels and discount tiers that had become commercially unfavourable as their spend grew. Additionally, a billing analysis revealed $2.8M of annual spend on underutilised Reserved Instances that had been purchased without adequate usage analysis.
We conducted a full AWS billing analysis, modelling actual service consumption against commitment coverage and identifying $2.8M of commitment waste. We benchmarked the client's existing EDP terms against our engagement database and identified that their discount tier was 12–15% below market rate for their spend level. We developed a credible multi-cloud strategy including Azure and GCP that created genuine competitive pressure for AWS in the EDP renegotiation. We restructured the commitment portfolio before approaching AWS, ensuring the new EDP was sized against clean baseline consumption data.
The new EDP delivered $6M in annual savings — $2.8M from waste elimination and commitment restructuring, plus $3.2M from improved EDP discount terms. The new agreement included a more favourable service scope, a lower minimum commitment threshold with defined ramp provision, and a FinOps governance framework that prevents the waste accumulation that had degraded the prior EDP's value.
Our cloud contract guide covers the commercial structure of AWS EDP, Azure MACC, and Google Cloud agreements — what's negotiable, what's standard, how the discount tiers work, and how to structure a multi-cloud commercial strategy that uses competitive pressure to improve terms across all three platforms.
Download Free Cloud Contract Guide →Waste elimination — unused resources, over-sized instances, orphaned storage — can deliver savings within days of analysis. Commitment restructuring and savings plan optimisation take 2–4 weeks and deliver savings immediately on implementation. Commercial negotiation of EDP or MACC terms takes 8–12 weeks but delivers the largest savings of all three categories — typically 20–35% of cloud spend on a permanent basis.
Commercial negotiation (EDP, MACC) is most effective at $1M+ annual cloud spend — below that threshold, you are unlikely to achieve EDP-level commercial terms. For cloud spend analysis, waste identification, and commitment optimisation, there is no minimum — the value scales with spend and the complexity of your cloud footprint. We assess the opportunity at scoping and recommend an approach that is proportionate to the value available.
Yes — this is one of the most powerful cross-vendor leverage opportunities in enterprise software. Azure MACC commitments are part of your Microsoft commercial relationship and can influence M365 EA terms. Google Cloud CUDs and Workspace licensing interact commercially. AWS EDP scope can include SaaS products from AWS's marketplace. We exploit these cross-product commercial dynamics as a standard component of cloud commercial strategy.
FinOps tools — CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management — provide excellent visibility into cloud spend but do not negotiate commercial terms on your behalf. The gap between list pricing and EDP/MACC pricing, the commitment coverage ratio, and the support plan structure are all commercial decisions that require negotiation expertise rather than tooling. FinOps tools and commercial advisory are complementary — the tooling maintains ongoing visibility; the advisory secures the best commercial terms.
Engage us before the growth. Cloud providers offer their best commercial terms when they are competing for your growth commitment. Negotiating your EDP or MACC at the point of growth — rather than after it — allows you to commit forecasted spend for better terms, establish commercial precedents that apply to all future growth, and retain leverage that disappears once the spend is already flowing.
Deep AWS commercial expertise — EDP negotiation, savings plan strategy, marketplace, support, and multi-service optimisation.
Azure MACC, M365, Copilot, and the integrated Microsoft commercial strategy that covers your full Microsoft relationship.
Google Cloud CUD negotiation, Workspace licensing, Vertex AI, and BigQuery commercial optimisation.
Book a free 30-minute cloud advisory consultation. We will assess your current cloud spend, identify immediate optimisation opportunities, and give you a clear picture of what structured advisory would deliver. No cost. No obligation.
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“We were spending $4.2M a month on AWS and had no FinOps programme in place. IT Negotiations reduced our run rate by 31% in 90 days without touching a single production workload.”
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