COMMITMENTS
Crawl, Walk, Run: Procurement Meets the Cloud Marketplace

Cloud commitments are messy. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all have their own rules for what counts toward a drawdown. A product that is marketplace-eligible in one may not qualify in another. Add in caps, clauses, renewals, and the fact that vendors and hyperscalers keep evolving their own tools, and suddenly procurement is being asked to manage an entirely new category of spend.

Finance looks at this and asks: where is the leverage, what is the ROI?
Procurement looks at this and asks: how do I operationalize this inside our buying process?

The answer is simple: you do not sprint. You crawl, then walk, then run.

Crawl: Learn the Language

Every journey starts with a baseline. Crawling means building a shared vocabulary.

  • Enterprise commitments are multi-year spend targets, but each cloud provider has its own drawdown rules.

  • A SaaS product may count toward AWS commitments but not Azure.

  • Marketplace eligibility is not universal, and procurement cannot assume coverage without validation.

For finance, crawling prevents misinterpreting coverage and overestimating ROI. For procurement, crawling is about documenting provider rules and making sure terms are clear before deals are signed.

Data: More than half of organizations fail to use available built-in discounts in their cloud bills. A study of $1.5B in AWS compute spend showed many companies paying on-demand rates when they could have been using commitment-based discounts (CIO Dive).

Also, nearly 78 % of organizations now prefer hybrid or multi-cloud strategies, which adds complexity to eligibility, vendor rules, and what you need to know about commitments (CloudKeeper).

Walk: Build the Process

Once you have the language, the harder work begins: changing procurement processes.

  • Procurement can negotiate caps on how much marketplace spend applies toward commitments, with flexibility to scale up in future renewals.

  • Vendors may include clauses tied to infrastructure or product type.

  • Finance needs visibility into what is eligible, what is not, and how that aligns with forecasts.

Walking is not glamorous, but it is where internal buy-in happens. Procurement has to show why marketplaces matter: faster transactions, leverage in drawdowns, and a clearer negotiation position when renewal cycles come around.

Data: In 2023, cloud marketplace sales at major hyperscaler marketplaces reached $16 billion, and analysts predict this will grow to over $85 billion by 2028 (Invisory).

Also, a report found that 62 % of companies are generating net-new revenue through cloud marketplaces, not just shifting direct deals, but actually creating new growth (Clazar).

Run: Optimize and Integrate

Running is where finance and procurement move beyond theory and start capturing real value.

  • Shortfalls can be covered by marketplace transactions, producing dollar-for-dollar savings.

  • FinOps data on usage integrates with ITAM data on licenses, giving procurement the confidence to negotiate terms backed by evidence.

  • Market consolidation (Snow, Spot, Flexera) and hyperscaler improvements keep shifting the ecosystem, so maturity means staying agile and integrated.

For finance, running means forward-looking models that protect against write-offs and strengthen renewal negotiations. For procurement, running means treating cloud commitments with the same rigor as supplier contracts, while navigating more moving parts.

Data: Commitment-based discount tools like AWS Savings Plans, Azure reserved instances or similar can deliver discounts up to ~72 % compared to on-demand pricing for some compute workloads, when usage is predictable and managed (PointFive).

Also, data shows that high-performing teams that treat marketplace as a strategic path (not just a workaround) report higher win rates, larger deal values, and faster cycles vs peers (Clazar).

Closing Thought

No organization skips steps. Crawling builds shared language. Walking creates repeatable processes. Running unlocks optimization and integration.

Wherever you are in the crawl-walk-run spectrum, the key is progress, not perfection.

NEWS
The Burn-Down Bulletin: More Things to Know

WEEKLY MVP

Donal Bourke

“Software procurement is a real dark art: trying to track licenses, people leaving, shadow IT, all of it. As FinOps embraces ITAM, that’s where the next big value lies.”

Donal Bourke, Senior Cloud Optimization Consultant

That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

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