A global media and entertainment company with operations across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific had been growing its Google Cloud Platform footprint rapidly over the previous three years — driven by a streaming infrastructure buildout and migration of content processing workloads from on-premises data centres to GCP. Annual GCP consumption had grown from $2.1M to $8M over this period, with an additional $2M in Google Workspace licences for approximately 4,800 employees.
The company's CUD (Committed Use Discount) structure had been set up by the engineering team without formal commercial guidance — committing to specific compute resources that were misaligned with actual workload patterns, resulting in significant CUD waste (paying for committed capacity that was not being consumed). Google's account team had proposed a new three-year CUD renewal at terms the CFO considered commercially unjustifiable given the misalignment.
Simultaneously, the company's Google Workspace subscription had been auto-renewed through the prior year without any seat rationalisation — retaining licences for employees who had left the organisation or moved to freelance arrangements. IT Negotiations was engaged to address both issues in a consolidated negotiation with Google.
"We had grown too fast on GCP without ever stopping to ask whether we were structured correctly. The answer turned out to be: not at all. IT Negotiations found savings we didn't know existed."
— CFO, Global Media & Entertainment Company (identity protected)The Google Cloud engagement presented three distinct challenges, each requiring different expertise:
IT Negotiations deployed a cloud commercial specialist and a FinOps analyst across a 10-week engagement running three concurrent workstreams.
Workstream 1 — GCP Consumption and CUD Analysis. We built a complete model of the company's GCP consumption across all projects and services over the preceding 12 months, using exported billing data from BigQuery. This analysis identified the precise CUD waste quantum ($912K annualised), the service areas generating consumption growth (BigQuery + Vertex AI), and the compute categories where CUD coverage was both appropriate and commercially beneficial. We redesigned the CUD structure to match actual consumption patterns — shifting from over-committed general-purpose compute to a mixed CUD strategy covering BigQuery slots and a right-sized compute CUD.
Workstream 2 — Workspace Audit and Rationalisation. Working with the company's IT team, we cross-referenced the Google Workspace licence list against active directory, HR records, and email activity data. We identified 480 unnecessary licences, including 120 Business Plus seats that could be downgraded to Business Standard for remaining active users who did not require the enhanced storage and security features in Business Plus. This workstream alone delivered $580K in annualised savings.
Workstream 3 — Google Commercial Negotiation. We reframed the CUD renewal conversation as a three-year strategic commitment discussion — positioning the company's AI/ML workload growth on Vertex AI and BigQuery as a long-term commitment that merited enhanced CUD pricing. We engaged Google's strategic enterprise team directly (bypassing the standard account manager) and presented a consolidated GCP + Workspace renewal proposal that gave Google clear visibility of the full relationship value. This approach unlocked a CUD discount level that the company had not been offered in prior renewal cycles. See our full Google Cloud advisory service and cloud cost optimisation service for more on this approach.
The restructured Google Cloud agreement reduced the company's combined GCP + Workspace spend from $10M annually to $6.5M — a 35% reduction — with improved flexibility and better alignment to actual consumption patterns.
The new CUD structure included quarterly utilisation reviews with Google's team — a provision that would allow the company to adjust CUD coverage as its BigQuery and Vertex AI footprint grew, preventing the misalignment problem from recurring. The Workspace rationalisation delivered an immediate reduction in recurring licence cost with no impact on productive employees.
The CTO noted that the FinOps analysis conducted by IT Negotiations produced a cloud spending transparency the company had not previously had — and that this visibility would prevent future over-commitment. Download our Cloud Contract Negotiation Guide and FinOps Maturity Model for the frameworks used in this engagement.
"The CUD analysis was genuinely eye-opening. We were paying for compute we weren't using while incurring on-demand charges for BigQuery that a simple CUD restructure would have cut in half. IT Negotiations found $2.8M we were leaving on the table every year."
— CTO, Global Media & Entertainment Company (identity protected)Free guides on cloud contract negotiation and FinOps strategy:
Poorly structured CUDs, Workspace licence bloat, and missed negotiation windows cost enterprises millions every year. Our cloud commercial specialists know exactly what Google will negotiate — and how to structure the deal. Book a free consultation.
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