A Fortune 500 professional services firm had grown rapidly through acquisitions. Different divisions used different clouds: AWS was the core, but Azure came in with M365 integrations, and GCP arrived with a machine learning-focused company they bought two years ago. No single governance, no unified cost controls, high spend, massive licensing overlap.
With 50,000 employees and global operations across 30 countries, the organization had become genuinely multi-cloud not by strategy but by accident. Teams duplicated tools. Contracts overlapped. No one knew total cloud spend.
We did not argue for cloud consolidation to a single provider. Instead, we accepted that this company had three clouds and made that an advantage: AWS for what it does best, Azure for identity, GCP for ML. Then we unified the control plane.
Instead of "move everything to AWS," we showed each division exactly what they spent, where, and why. Teams saw the duplicate costs and asked for consolidation. The governance council did not force optimization, it enabled it.
Bring the problem. We'll come back with a written brief: what to build, what to defer, and where AI actually moves the number. No deck pitches.