CIOs highlight negotiation opportunities as AWS and Google lower cloud costs

“I always look at the platform’s reliability, the quality of support, how well it integrates with our systems, and whether it gives us the flexibility to scale or pivot in the future. Price cuts may open the door, but the overall value and long-term fit matter,” Nekvinda added.

For Wilfredo Perez, CIO at Muvi Cinemas, a multi-cloud and platform-agnostic approach will minimise the impact of any single provider’s price drop. “For sure, we celebrate a price reduction, but our strategy goes in the direction of being platform-independent or multi-cloud. Combining this idea with a pay-per-use model, we can balance and get a higher ROI,” he said.

Perez divides workloads between pay-per-use, cloud-native services for transactional needs and reserved instances for resource-intensive tasks, using containers for maximum flexibility. In contract negotiations, he focuses on cost transparency, clear SLAs, and the ability to add licenses as needed.