A global media company running production workloads on Google Cloud had never formally negotiated its committed use strategy. An advisory engagement restructured its CUD portfolio, secured an enterprise discount programme, and identified $4.1 million in savings over three years — without migrating a single workload.
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A global media and entertainment company with annual GCP spend of approximately $8.5 million had migrated the majority of its content delivery, encoding, and analytics workloads to Google Cloud over the prior three years. Despite being a substantial GCP customer, the organisation had not entered into any committed use discounts beyond the standard 1-year CUDs applied automatically by the platform to some compute instances. There was no enterprise discount programme in place, no formal GCP negotiation strategy, and no FinOps function managing commitment coverage.
The company's cloud infrastructure lead recognised that the organisation's growing spend and reasonably stable compute baseline made it a strong candidate for both resource-based and spend-based CUDs, as well as an EDP negotiation. They engaged a specialist Google Cloud negotiation firm through the BestNegotiationFirms advisory process to conduct a full opportunity assessment and lead the commercial engagement with Google.
Editorial note: All client details have been anonymised. Savings figures represent the difference between on-demand and committed pricing, inclusive of EDP discounts, verified by the client's finance team against actual billed spend. For background on GCP's commitment mechanics, see our GCP cost optimisation guide and our Google Cloud CUD negotiation guide.
The engagement identified four distinct optimisation opportunities that required separate but coordinated approaches:
The advisory team structured the engagement around a 90-day analysis phase followed by a structured commercial negotiation with Google's strategic accounts team.
Using GCP billing export data and Cloud Monitoring capacity metrics, advisors built a workload-by-workload commitment model identifying the optimal CUD type (resource vs spend-based), term (1-year vs 3-year), and scope for each service group. The analysis identified $4.8M in annual spend eligible for committed pricing.
Slot usage analysis over a 12-month period showed consistent baseline consumption of 400–600 slots, with peaks to 1,200 slots during peak publishing periods. Advisors recommended a 500-slot BigQuery Enterprise edition commitment with autoscale for peak capacity, replacing on-demand pricing and delivering a 45% cost reduction on that workload component.
Advisors structured a $12M three-year EDP commitment that Google's strategic accounts team accepted after three rounds of negotiation. The EDP delivered an incremental 8% discount on all eligible GCP services beyond the CUD savings, and included marketplace credit provisions that the company used to offset third-party tool costs.
The advisory team presented an AWS equivalent architecture analysis showing that an AWS migration with reserved instance commitments would deliver comparable infrastructure at a 12% lower three-year cost. While the company had no genuine AWS migration appetite, this benchmark shifted Google's negotiating posture on both CUD pricing and EDP terms.
Google Cloud's commercial team was willing to discuss EDP terms once the advisory team demonstrated that the company's three-year projected spend would comfortably exceed $12M — making it a tier-qualifying account. The key negotiation point was the EDP discount rate itself: Google's opening position of 5% was pushed to 8% by combining the commitment size argument with the AWS competitive analysis and by committing to include the BigQuery Enterprise spend in the EDP baseline.
One nuance that the advisory team navigated carefully was the relationship between CUD commitments and EDP eligibility. CUD discounts and EDP discounts are stackable in GCP's commercial model, but the EDP's eligible service scope excludes certain SKUs. Ensuring the CUD portfolio was structured so that maximum spend qualified for EDP stacking required detailed knowledge of Google's billing taxonomy. For the full methodology, see our GCP cost optimisation guide and our cloud enterprise discount negotiation guide.
We were paying on-demand rates for workloads that had been running on the same configuration for two years. The CUD analysis alone was worth more than the advisory fee. The EDP negotiation on top of that was something we never would have known to ask for.
The primary value-driver in this engagement was workload analysis rigour. Many organisations have a general sense that they should use committed pricing but lack the analytical depth to structure commitments correctly — leading to either under-commitment (paying on-demand for stable workloads) or over-commitment (locking in capacity that isn't fully utilised). The billing export analysis conducted in this engagement provided the granular baseline needed to make commitments with confidence.
The EDP negotiation outcome — 8% versus Google's opening 5% — was also more than it appears. On a $12M three-year commitment, the incremental 3% is worth $360,000. But the more significant long-term value is in the precedent set for renewal negotiations. GCP EDP discount rates tend to be sticky — organisations that negotiate a strong initial EDP rate typically renew at or above that rate as their spend grows.
For a full framework on managing GCP commercial relationships, see our cloud cost optimisation guide and our dedicated Google Cloud negotiation guide. Our cloud contract guide white paper covers the contractual provisions to prioritise in GCP EDP negotiations.
Running $2M+ annually on Google Cloud? CUD and EDP optimisation typically saves 25–40%.