Solidifying the Cloud Foundation: Global Building Materials Leader Achieves $4.7M in Realized Savings

A global provider of innovative building materials builds a fortress of fiscal discipline and operational visibility across 100 countries with HCL MyXalytics.

Overview

• The Challenge: Month-over-month increases in Azure costs combined with a slow-moving process for realizing recommendations and inconsistent resource tagging.
• The Solution: Deployment of HCL MyXalytics to drive actionable intelligence, establish forward-looking cost models, and institutionalize a global FinOps discipline.
• The Results: $4.7 million in total savings through the removal of orphan resources, strategic right-sizing, and improved accountability.

Key Achievements

• Major cost recovery: $4.7M in total realized savings.
• Inventory optimization: $986K saved through precision right-sizing.
• Waste reduction: $168K recovered by identifying and removing Reserved Instance underutilization and $42K from wastage elimination.
• Future-proofing: $270K in value delivered through "Ever-greening" initiatives.

The Challenge

For a global provider of high-quality cement and urbanization solutions active in nearly 100 countries, the foundation of their cloud environment was starting to show cracks. Managing sprawling costs across such a vast geographical footprint proved inefficient due to several critical issues:

• The cost escalator: Consistent month-over-month increases in MS Azure platform costs without sufficient oversight.
• Process friction: A slow-moving and time-consuming process for actually implementing the savings recommendations identified by technical teams.
• Accountability gaps: Inaccurate and inconsistent resource tagging strategies prevented achieving true cost visibility and holding specific product owners accountable for their spend.
• Fragmented FinOps signal: A lack of a unified, real-time view prevented leadership from making informed, strategic planning decisions.

The Solution

To harden their financial posture, the global leader deployed HCL MyXalytics. We provided the blueprint for a global FinOps standard that integrated cost-discipline into the heart of their cloud operations, anchored in:

• Actionable intelligence: Trends and anomalies were identified and service-and team-level views demystified usage, pinpointed immediate cost-saving actions and built internal trust.
• Tagging compliance: A FinOps-compliant tagging strategy automatically strengthened visibility across products, regions, and teams.
• Forward-looking models: By translating historical usage into clear, predictive cost models, visibility into storage growth, top spenders, and future initiatives was improved.
• Cost discipline by design: Cloud cost policies elevated "cost" as a key design criterion for all new projects and feature rollouts.
• Operational transparency: Monthly cost and usage reports, shared directly with product owners and technical leads, reinforced financial accountability.

The Results

By constructing a culture of discipline with HCL MyXalytics, the company solidified its cloud ROI with massive, measurable results:

• Total realized savings: $4.7 Million—achieved by making FinOps an integral part of strategic planning.
• Right-sizing wins: $986K saved by ensuring infrastructure was perfectly scaled to meet actual business demands.
• Inventory cleanup: $168K recovered through better RI management and $42K through the elimination of orphaned resources.
• Sustainability and evergreen value: $270K delivered via evergreen optimization, ensuring the infrastructure remains efficient as it scales globally.

About the Company

A global provider of innovative and sustainable building materials, leveraging vertically integrated production to deliver cement, ready-mix concrete, and aggregates. Active in nearly 100 countries, the organization supports its global operations through a massive trading network.

Is your cloud spend built on a shaky foundation? Request a demo of HCL MyXalytics today.