A regional bank in the financial-services sector, managing 550+ workloads and applications, intended to migrate to a hyperscaler cloud and update their infrastructure.
Challenge
NEBULOUS DEPENDENCIES AND EXPENSIVE RENEWAL
The bank’s existing workloads had grown organically over time, leading to many undocumented application dependencies, making migration risky and unpredictable. A recent dramatic increase in the renewal cost for their VMware licensing turned an upcoming renewal into a potential financial burden, forcing the bank to pause the cloud migration plan until they addressed these underlying issues.
Approach
SMART ASSESSMENT AND MITIGATION
We executed a three-phase strategy:
- Renew – We negotiated a more favorable VMware renewal price using an arbitrage method, restoring cost efficiency and flexibility as a foundation for further change.
- Assess – We deployed our Application & Workload Intelligence (AWI) framework to fully map all 550+ workloads and applications, exposing hidden dependencies, readiness gaps, cost metrics, and interrelationships that had previously been obscured.
- Mitigate / Optimize – Based on AWI insights, we reorganized workloads to their most appropriate environments.
Results
Renewal cost came in 48% below what a direct vendor renewal would have cost, delivering immediate financial relief. 100% of workloads mapped through AWI, giving the bank a clear, accurate infrastructure inventory and a data-driven modernization roadmap. Infrastructure overhead reduced by about 20%, simplifying management and lowering ongoing costs. Workloads were reorganized for hybrid infrastructure that supports future ML, data-heavy, and cloud-native workloads, positioning the bank for long-term growth.
Takeaways
The bank’s unwieldy and nebulous IT infrastructure could have derailed their upgrade plans, but we were able to turn a looming cost crisis into a strategic modernization opportunity. The bank gained precise visibility into their entire infrastructure, regained control over their spend, and moved to a flexible, hybrid environment that supports future-facing workloads like AI and analytics. They now have the foundation for a smarter, scalable, cost-effective infrastructure built for the next decade.
