Technology cost optimisation · Australia
Engineering-led cost reduction across cloud, SaaS, data platforms and observability. Two weeks, read-only access, and a written report where every finding carries a dollar figure — because the waste is in how the systems are built and used, not in how the contracts were signed.
Monthly technology spend
Illustrative · 12 months
The problem, in published numbers
Australian organisations will spend A$172.3 billion on IT this year. The share of it that does nothing is well documented, by people with no stake in your decision.
29%
of public cloud spend is wasted — up slightly after five years of decline, as AI and new services add complexity.
Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud
46%
of SaaS licences sit unused. Average licence utilisation across the dataset is just 54%.
Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index
78%
of IT leaders were hit with unexpected charges from consumption or AI-based pricing in the past year.
Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index
A$33.6b
Australian public cloud spend forecast for 2026, up 17.9% year on year. SaaS alone is A$16.4 billion of it.
Gartner, May 2026
Two of those figures are worth sitting with. Sixty-one per cent of IT leaders told Zylo they had to cut projects because of unplanned SaaS cost increases — the waste isn't abstract, it displaces work you wanted to do. And business units now control 81% of SaaS spend while IT directly manages 15%, which is precisely why nobody in the building can tell you what the total is.
On the cloud side, Flexera found 85% of organisations name managing cloud spend as their top challenge, and 17% exceeded their public cloud budget last year. Those are averages across mature organisations with FinOps teams. Most Australian mid-market companies do not have one.
The distinction
They find completely different money, and most organisations need both. What matters is knowing which lever applies to which problem — and being told honestly where the limits are.
Procurement-led
Engineering-led
Most engagements start on the engineering side, because that's where findings are fastest and least disputed. If what you actually need is rate benchmarking against what other buyers pay, we'll say so and point you to a firm that holds that data.
Where the money is
Take one, or run them in sequence. Every engagement is read-only and ends with a written report you keep whether you continue or not.
Two weeks · read-only access
Commitment coverage, idle resources, storage lifecycle and network patterns. The largest single line on most technology budgets.
What's included LicensingTwo weeks · usage data
Inactive seats, duplicate tools, over-provisioned tiers and auto-renewals nobody diarised. Proven from your own login data.
What's included DataTwo weeks · query telemetry
Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery bills that grew faster than the data did. Almost always a query and warehouse problem.
What's includedTwo weeks · usage review
Datadog, New Relic and Splunk bills that quietly multiplied. Usually custom metric cardinality and log retention.
What's included CommercialTwo to three weeks · contracts & usage
Renewal exposure, licensing position and the usage evidence your team takes into a vendor conversation.
What's included ComplianceTwo weeks · assessment & roadmap
A scored assessment against all eight controls and a costed roadmap, before your insurer or your next tender asks.
What's includedA worked example
Annualised reduction $87,600 — about 21%
A composite example, not a client result. Yours will differ — and one line is
always left alone, because not every number is worth chasing.
How an audit runs
Day 1
Read-only roles and usage exports. Nothing is changed, nothing is deployed.
Days 2–7
Billing, inventory, telemetry and utilisation. Two questions by email at most.
Days 8–12
Every finding written up with a dollar figure and the work required to capture it.
Day 14
One hour together. You keep the report whether you continue or not.
The name, and the idea behind it
Technology spend goes wrong when the two halves stop matching — when what you pay for stops resembling what you actually use. The work is bringing them back into line.
What you're paying for
What it should be
Where you sit
Scope, access and fee all differ by size, which is why there is no price list on this site. Every engagement is quoted after a look at the actual environment.
The bill grew alongside the product and nobody owns it. Usually one or two audits, a short engagement, and findings a single engineer can implement in a sprint. Compliance turns up when a customer sends a security questionnaire.
Start with cloudMultiple accounts, multiple teams, and spend spread across four vendors nobody reconciles. Usually a sequence of audits with cost attributed back to business units, plus an Essential Eight position your board and your insurer can both read.
See how audits sequenceWhy cost and compliance together
Most organisations put off their Essential Eight uplift because it is a cost with no revenue attached. It stays on the list until an insurer or a tender forces it, and then it happens badly and in a hurry.
Running a cost audit first changes the maths. A typical finding covers the compliance work several times over, out of budget you were already spending. Same engineer, same environment, no second discovery phase.
Before anything else
Two of the three ways we run an audit involve no credentials of any kind. That is the starting position, not a concession — and everything below is in the contract.
Next step
A cost export and fifteen minutes on a call is enough for us to tell you whether an audit is worth your money. If it isn't, that's a short conversation and it costs nothing.
Start a conversation