ePlus Azure Assessment Helps Retail and Marketing Company Improve Support Experience and Realize Cost Savings Opportunity

ePlus Azure Assessment Helps Retail and Marketing Company Improve Support Experience and Realize Cost Savings

Retail and marketing company reveals a 16% potential cost savings opportunity and highlights enhanced technical support through a strategic transition from existing enterprise agreement to ePlus CSP+ Azure Optimize.

Cloud

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Background

The customer operates hundreds of retail locations that serve millions of customers each year. They rely heavily on Azure to support mission-critical systems, including point-of-sale operations, fuel distribution and logistics, store level inventory management, and enterprise applications powering a distributed retail footprint.

Business Challenges

With its Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) approaching expiration, the customer evaluated alternatives that could deliver a stronger, more dependable support and advisory model for its Azure environment.

Challenge 1

Support Experience: The customer experienced support challenges that resulted in long delays and inadequate resolutions, creating risk for a high-transaction retail environment.

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Challenge 1

Unoptimized Azure Consumption: With limited proactive cost management (FinOps), cloud costs continued to rise with minimal visibility into optimization opportunities or workload rightsizing.

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Recognizing the need for both improved visibility and a more dependable support model, the customer engaged ePlus to transition from its existing EA to Azure CSP+ and to implement Azure Optimize, the ePlus FinOps-driven advisory service embedded within CSP+.

Solution

ePlus Azure CSP+ provides a modern, flexible way to procure and support Azure services, while ePlus Azure Optimize (an offering of ePlus Cloud Managed Services) adds ongoing cost optimization insights delivered through ePlus proprietary tooling and FinOps expertise.

THE STRATEGIC VALUE DELIVERED INCLUDES:

Better control of cloud spend through continuous analysis, automated recommendations, and FinOps monitoring
Confidence in workload alignment through rightsizing and usage-based optimization
Improved operational agility enabled by CSP flexibility and enhanced technical support
Focus on innovation instead of cloud cost management and troubleshooting

Cloud optimization is not a one-time project; it's an ongoing discipline. The example ePlus Azure Optimize dashboard included below demonstrates how consistent, incremental improvements result in large and compounding financial impact.

Business Outcomes

Proof Points:

16% initial Azure cost savings identified through rightsizing, reserved instance recommendations, and architecture optimization, with > $60K in projected annual benefit
The ePlus team handles 98% of support requests end‑to‑end, eliminating escalation delays and ensuring rapid, high‑quality Azure issue resolution
Anticipation, mitigation, and escalation to address compute SKU quota increases during CSP migration
Seamless EA → CSP migration with minimal disruption
12-month ePlus Azure Optimize engagement ensuring sustained cost governance

Premium Support Experience

The customer has direct access to US-based ePlus Azure engineers who resolve 98% of support tickets in house, without the delays of Microsoft escalations. This delivers faster issue resolution, minimizes downtime, and provides a more reliable support experience—ideal for their mission-critical environment where responsiveness matters.

Flexible and Cost-Efficient Consumption Model

The organization benefits from the CSP+ customer-friendly commercial structure with:

Monthly Azure billing for improved cash flow predictability
No minimum spend commitments, unlike traditional Enterprise Agreements
The ability to scale Azure usage up or down as business needs evolve

This flexibility removes long-term constraints and aligns cloud consumption directly to operational demand.

Intelligent, Ongoing Cost Optimization

ePlus Azure Optimize, built directly into CSP+, provides continuous cost governance powered by ePlus-developed IP, dashboards, and FinOps expertise. This ensures they maintain a well optimized, financially efficient Azure environment over time with:

Actionable optimization insights across compute, storage, and PaaS
Rightsizing, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and Savings Plan guidance
Visibility into savings trends, optimization categories, and cost allocation
Expert recommendations from certified FinOps practitioners

Measurable Cost Savings and Financial Optimization

Through the combined implementation of ePlus CSP+ Azure Optimize, the customer achieves immediate and ongoing financial benefits that directly impact its bottom line. The ePlus Azure assessment identified 16% in initial cost savings opportunities through rightsizing, reserved instance recommendations, and architecture optimization. The Azure Optimize engagement provides ongoing FinOps-aligned recommendations, ensuring they continue to maximize cloud ROI while maintaining the agility to scale hundreds of retail locations efficiently.

Operational Excellence through Expert Partnership and Proactive Support

The EA-to-CSP transition required precise coordination to avoid operational impact, and ePlus guided that journey while maintaining full continuity for critical retail systems. Now operating under CSP+, the customer benefits from industry-leading support, with US-based ePlus Azure engineers resolving most issues in-house—eliminating escalations, interruptions, and support delays. Combined with ePlus Azure Optimize advisory-driven cost governance, the customer now has both operational confidence and financial clarity across its Azure footprint.