Smarter FinOps for high demand retail operations

Assaí is Brazil’s largest food retailer, serving families as well as the many small and medium businesses that rely on bulk or unitary purchasing, competitive prices and diverse product availability. Operating at this scale places significant demand on systems to support supply chain, pricing, replenishment and store operations— a challenge amplified by the Company’s rapid expansion, reinforcing the need for scalable, efficient and resilient technology platforms.

As Assaí expanded their microservices architecture, added new cloud workloads and diversified environments across multiple accounts, the technology landscape naturally became more complex. This reflects a wider challenge across Brazil’s retail sector, where rapid cloud adoption increases the need of governing usage, considering cost drivers and ensuring predictable performance.

Assaí needed clearer visibility into cloud consumption to maintain performance and cost predictability as its digital footprint expanded.

Assaí partnered with IBM and Nava to modernize its cloud governance using a phased FinOps journey. The first phase began with IBM Turbonomic®, selected after a six‑month, production‑scale PoC showed deep visibility across both cloud and on‑premise workloads—critical for a hybrid retailer with 90+ systems and thousands of microservices.

Turbonomic continuously analyzed application demand, identifying oversized databases, unused clusters, inefficient microservices and even underpowered workloads that required investment—not just cost cuts. By integrating with ServiceNow, Assaí automated high‑confidence actions such as right‑sizing and scaling. Optimization moved from manual investigation to ongoing, policy‑driven automation.

In the next phase, IBM Cloudability® unified cost visibility across multiple cloud accounts. Assaí established cost centers, workload tagging, forecasting and budget workflows while gaining insights on seasonality, reservation planning and anomalous consumption. Cloudability became the central reference point for executives, engineering and finance teams.

Together, IBM, Nava, Turbonomic and Cloudability helped Assaí shift from fragmented cloud management to a coordinated, maturing FinOps practice.

With IBM Turbonomic and IBM Cloudability—implemented in partnership with Nava—Assaí built a scalable, automated FinOps operating model. Turbonomic delivered roughly 30% cloud savings, accelerated break‑even to under seven months and reduced performance‑related troubleshooting by identifying right‑sizing and investment needs early. Automated change execution through ServiceNow cut manual infrastructure work by 15–20%.

Cloudability added financial governance, enabling precise cost allocation, seasonality‑aligned optimization, reservation planning, budgeting and anomaly alerts. Executives and development teams now share a unified view of cloud consumption and cost drivers.

Assaí’s FinOps maturity rose from zero to level five (on a 10‑point scale) in under two years, with the goal of reaching level eight or higher in 2026—supported by FinOps Foundation practices and ongoing partnership with IBM and Nava.

Assaí, headquartered in São Paulo and founded in 1974, is Brazil’s largest food retailer Operating 300+ stores nationwide, it serves both families and small and medium businesses, welcoming more than 40 million customers each month.

Nava is a Brazil based technology services company focused on cloud, data, observability and cybersecurity. As an IBM Partner Plus member, Nava supports automation, FinOps and modernization programs for enterprise clients across industries.