Overview
Capita plc is one of the largest business process outsourcing firms in the UK, with operations across eight countries. It serves clients across public and private sectors (including financial services, retail, healthcare, and government) and has workloads in multiple cloud environments.
Although Capita had a mature FinOps practice and produced a high Azure compute Effective Savings Rate (ESR) of 37%, its FinOps team wanted to push savings further to achieve superior financial outcomes and deliver better results for clients. By adopting ProsperOps Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) for Microsoft Azure, Capita exceeded its savings goals on complex, cyclical workloads without adding resources.
Cyclical Workload Patterns Added to the Complexity
One major challenge was the cyclical nature of Capita’s Azure environments. Usage declined on weekends (when compute resources were turned off) and increased during weekdays. Covering aggressively would have put Capita at risk of unutilized commitments and wasted spend, while covering conservatively meant missing out on potential savings. Striking the right balance was difficult, especially as workloads grew.
To minimize the risk of overcommitment, the FinOps team took a conservative approach, maintaining coverage at 40%. However, this strategy left potential savings on the table.
Labor-Intensive, Manual Approach to Commitment Management
Compounding this challenge was Capita’s manual approach to managing commitments. Aligning long-term commitments with fluctuating workload patterns required constant monitoring, forecasting, and adjustments. In an environment with shifting usage patterns, achieving optimal coverage, utilization, and savings through manual effort was humanly impossible.
The high degree of effort involved placed a significant operational burden on the FinOps team and took time away from focusing on other FinOps-related initiatives, where human decision-making may be more important. This limited their ability to scale FinOps practices and unlock greater business value from the cloud.
With commitments nearing expiration, the FinOps team sought a solution that would automatically manage their complex Azure environments without additional overhead.
How ProsperOps Implements Adaptive Laddering and Other Strategies for Capita
ProsperOps is a leading FinOps automation platform that optimizes costs across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. With ProsperOps’ sophisticated algorithms, Capita increased its ESR despite cyclical usage patterns. ProsperOps also ensured that commitments were utilized by modifying them to apply to active resources.
These outcomes were achieved through a blend of strategies:
- Adaptive Laddering – ProsperOps deployed commitments in small, frequent increments over time, which distributed risk and increased flexibility, instead of making batch purchases. This approach allowed Capita to adjust commitment coverage levels as needed.
- Optimal Coverage for Cyclical Workloads – ProsperOps optimized for ESR, not perfect commitment utilization/coverage. Committing above usage troughs captured more savings. Optimal coverage was recalculated continuously, and commitments were adjusted accordingly as usage changed.
- Blended Portfolio Management – A mixture of commitment types and terms (e.g., 1‑year/3-year Savings Plans for Compute/ Reservations) was implemented based on Capita’s savings goals, risk profile, business context, and other factors.
Achieving a 49% ESR and 75% Coverage in Two Months
Capita automatically boosted its ESR by 12 percentage points, from 37% to 49%, and increased coverage from 40% to 75% in just two months. Despite higher coverage, reservation utilization held steady at 98%, demonstrating that savings increased without tipping into overcommitment. These gains were achieved despite cyclical workload patterns. Commitments adjusted to increases in usage on the weekdays and decreases during the weekends.
Beyond economic outcomes, ProsperOps offloaded labor-intensive rate optimization tasks previously handled by the FinOps team. With automated commitment management, the team redirected time to higher-order FinOps work, unlocking additional business value.
Final Thoughts
Capita achieved greater savings and flexibility with the help of ProsperOps. Using automation to implement sophisticated rate optimization strategies, ProsperOps enabled Capita to surpass its previous ESR despite dynamic, cyclical compute workloads on Azure. ProsperOps also streamlined rate optimization tasks for Capita’s FinOps team, freeing time for other priorities.
| Key Metrics | Impact in Two Months |
| Effective Savings Rate | Increased from 37% to 49% |
| Coverage | Nearly doubled from 40% to 75% |
About ProsperOps
ProsperOps is the leading FinOps automation platform for cloud cost optimization on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Eliminating waste and achieving cost-saving goals is challenging when cloud usage is elastic, but commitments are inelastic. Founded in 2018, ProsperOps automates and synchronizes rate with workload optimization, eliminating waste, reducing costs and risk, and improving efficiency for FinOps teams. Customers achieve world-class Effective Savings Rates and lower Commitment Lock-In Risk with ProsperOps’ algorithms.
