How Bluesight achieved 22x ROI on cloud cost management

About Bluesight

Bluesight provides critical software solutions for U.S. hospitals, addressing pharmacy operations, compliance, and drug management challenges. Their products support everything from inventory management and drug diversion monitoring to predicting nationwide drug shortages—work that directly impacts patient care and hospital operations.

As a private equity-backed company growing through both organic expansion and acquisitions, Bluesight operates entirely in AWS. With multiple product lines and data-intensive workloads, cloud efficiency isn’t just about cutting costs—it’s about sustainable growth.

The challenge

Bluesight faced a perfect storm of cost optimization pressures:

Recent acquisition complexity. A new acquisition brought disparate tech stacks and data center migrations into the fold, significantly expanding their AWS footprint and operational scope.

Time constraints. The business needed to hit aggressive savings targets within 8-9 months to meet board commitments—not the typical timeline for major infrastructure changes.

Previously optimized baseline. Bluesight had already implemented a FinOps program, established reserved instances and savings plans, and was running at a healthy 8-10% of revenue as cloud spend. Further optimization required specialist-level expertise.

Growth in parallel. While optimizing costs, the engineering team was simultaneously launching three new products with additional data feeds and infrastructure requirements.

Why Duckbill

Bluesight evaluated multiple approaches, including software-based cost optimization tools. These tools could show where spend was happening, but they couldn’t explain why, or what to do about it in the context of Bluesight’s specific business constraints, risk tolerance, and timeline.

What set Duckbill apart:

Flexible engagement models. Duckbill offered options ranging from deep-dive reviews to embedded engineering support, allowing Bluesight to match the engagement to their specific timeline and business constraints.

Depth of expertise. Even before the formal engagement, Duckbill reviewed months of AWS invoices and studied Bluesight’s entire tech stack. The questions they asked demonstrated specialist-level understanding—not surface-level analysis.

He continued: “We didn’t have to explain anything about any of the services. They already knew everything about them. It was just a case of, ‘Hey, why are you using this, this, and this? Have you considered this instead? Are there any blockers here?'”

Executive-ready communication. Duckbill presented findings directly to Bluesight’s executive team, including technical advisors and the CEO, building rapport and delivering nuanced recommendations about risk, timeline, and business impact.

In order to go deeper, Duckbill Group designed a custom process to analyze these data-intensive tasks. The team looked at the utilization of the compute clusters for batch jobs and set goals that the Fanatics teams could track to better maintain efficiency going forward. These recommendations were tiered by effort and cost-savings so the Fanatics team could prioritize the improvements and tackle them over time. 

The first round of changes was easy to prioritize. “When Duckbill Group’s report said we’d save millions of dollars annually everyone could see this would be a big win,” Sheeley said. “With the clarity of the recommendations and the obvious cost savings, the application teams were happy to negotiate priorities. And, it turns out, the changes were relatively easy to make and didn’t take very long to implement.” 

Duckbill Group’s report also identified new key performance indicators (KPIs) for this core service, determined their current performance level, and then set new targets for performance based on similar companies. These new benchmarks will help the Fanatics team measure progress over time and maintain cost savings. 

The engagement

Bluesight worked with Duckbill on a comprehensive cost optimization assessment that examined their entire AWS environment. The engagement focused on areas where Bluesight could achieve meaningful savings within its business timeline, while also identifying longer-term architectural improvements for future consideration.

Vijay emphasized the partnership aspect:

Key areas of focus included:

• Storage optimization across backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery strategies
• Data transfer costs, including inter-region transfers and replication
• Compute efficiency and workload rightsizing
• Service-level cost drivers that weren’t immediately apparent in standard AWS reporting

Throughout the process, Duckbill helped Bluesight understand the trade-offs involved in various optimization approaches, ensuring recommendations aligned with the company’s risk tolerance and operational requirements.

Results

Vijay shared the headline number with Bluesight’s board:

Exceeded board targets. Bluesight achieved—and surpassed—their aggressive cost savings goals within the required timeline.

New products launched at net-zero cost. The savings exceeded the infrastructure costs of three new product launches, effectively making those deployments free from a cloud spend perspective.

Strategic roadmap for 2026. Beyond immediate savings, Duckbill identified additional optimization opportunities that Bluesight will execute next year, providing a clear path for continued efficiency gains.

The bottom line

For engineering leaders, opportunities to directly impact enterprise value are rare. Revenue attribution is complex and indirect. But cloud optimization? That’s a straight path to the bottom line.