A global financial services firm with operations across four continents had grown its AWS footprint organically over seven years. What had started as a proof-of-concept environment for their capital markets analytics division had expanded, through a combination of organic growth and three acquisitions, into a $7.8M annual AWS spend across 14 AWS accounts in four regions — without ever having negotiated a single commercial agreement with Amazon Web Services at the enterprise level.
The firm was operating entirely on public on-demand pricing, supplemented by a modest portfolio of Reserved Instances that had been purchased without coordination across business units. AWS's account team had proposed an Enterprise Discount Programme with a $24M three-year commitment — a structure that would have delivered some savings over on-demand rates, but at terms that reflected almost none of the firm's actual commercial leverage.
When the firm's CTO retained us, the core challenges were:
The firm had no prior experience negotiating cloud enterprise agreements and had been relying entirely on AWS's account team for commercial guidance — a team whose compensation is directly tied to the contract value they close.
Before any engagement with AWS, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the firm's current and projected AWS spend across all 14 accounts. We disaggregated spend by service category, region, and usage pattern to identify which services were EDP-eligible, which were better served by Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, and where the firm's actual cost optimisation levers resided. This analysis revealed that AWS's proposed EDP structure would cover only 61% of actual spend — the remainder sitting outside EDP scope entirely.
We developed a credible competitive narrative for the negotiation. The firm had meaningful Azure usage in its European operations and had recently completed a cloud strategy review that identified three workloads as candidates for GCP migration. We constructed a documented alternative that gave AWS's commercial team a genuine reason to improve their offer — not a bluff, but a well-evidenced representation of the client's strategic optionality. AWS's response to competitive pressure is predictable to those who have managed these relationships from the inside.
Working with AWS's enterprise team, we fundamentally redesigned the EDP structure. We negotiated tiered discount rates — higher discounts at lower commitment levels to protect flexibility — rather than AWS's preferred flat-rate structure. We also negotiated inclusion of AWS Marketplace credits ($240K annually), Professional Services credits ($180K), and a Support tier upgrade (Enterprise Support) at no additional cost. The renegotiated EDP covered 84% of projected spend rather than the original 61%.
Parallel to the EDP negotiation, we conducted a Reserved Instance audit and rationalised the firm's RI portfolio. We identified $1.2M in underutilised RI capacity and worked with AWS to exchange expired and misaligned RIs under AWS's exchange programme — a programme that AWS does not proactively offer to customers but will execute when requested. We restructured the remaining RI strategy around Compute Savings Plans, which provide the same financial benefit with significantly greater flexibility.
Given the firm's financial services regulatory environment, we negotiated specific contractual provisions covering data residency, availability zone redundancy commitments, audit rights, and incident response SLAs. We also introduced provisions covering AWS's right to modify service terms — provisions that protect the client from unilateral changes to services that underpin regulated workloads. These terms are not available in AWS's standard agreements but are achievable through direct negotiation at this contract scale.
The final EDP delivered $6.8M in savings over the three-year term — a 28% effective discount rate compared to the 15% AWS had originally proposed. Combined with the Reserved Instance rationalisation and the annual credits secured for Marketplace and Professional Services, the total financial benefit of the engagement exceeded $8M against an advisory fee representing less than 3% of that figure.
The amended contractual provisions covering data sovereignty and service modification rights have proven particularly valuable as AWS has introduced several changes to its financial services compliance framework in the twelve months following contract execution — changes that would have required renegotiation under the original proposed terms.
"We had been operating on Amazon's terms for seven years without realising how much commercial leverage we had accumulated. Atonement Licensing turned that leverage into real savings and real contractual protections — both of which will compound over the life of the agreement."Chief Technology Officer — Global Financial Services Firm, Four Continents
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud enterprise agreement structures decoded — EDP mechanics, discount levers, credit provisions, and negotiation strategies from former AWS insiders.
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