How Axians CS - Netherlands scales multi-tenant orchestration with usage-based pricing

About

Axians Communication Solutions is based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and operates as a decentralized brand within Vinci Energies. The organization manages complex IT infrastructures for a diverse customer base, including government agencies, hospitals, educational institutions, and large commercial enterprises. These environments are often mission-critical and subject to strict regulatory and compliance requirements.

To support customers more effectively and consistently, Axians CS set out to introduce orchestration and automation as a core capability within its managed services portfolio. The objective was not only to automate repetitive operational tasks, but also to enable customer-facing teams to transform operational data into actionable insights—and to act on those insights through orchestrated workflows.

Today, multiple customer-facing teams actively use Windmill as the orchestration platform within the broader Axians Intelligence Platform, with many additional customers currently in the onboarding pipeline. A key challenge was finding a platform that could support Axians CS' long-term growth strategy while enabling decentralized execution combined with centralized governance.

The problem

Ben Willems, Product Owner of the Axians CS Automation Team, faced a fundamental scaling challenge: how to provide orchestration and automation capabilities to 150 unique customer environments without incurring massive upfront costs or introducing governance and compliance risks.

Axians CS operates in environments where customers entrust the organization with their most critical infrastructure. This level of trust requires predictability, transparency, and strict compliance. At the same time, Axians CS wanted to empower its engineers—those closest to the customer—to design, develop, and operate automations themselves.

"We manage network and datacenter environments for customers such as government agencies, schools, hospitals, and large enterprises. These customers entrust Axians CS with mission-critical infrastructure, which requires a high degree of control, transparency, and compliance. To meet these expectations, we want to enable our engineers—who work closest to the customer—to develop automations themselves, within a centrally governed, secure, and auditable platform."

— Ben Willems, Product Owner, Automation Team

The broader ambition was to evolve into a data-driven MSP: collecting data from managed environments, transforming that data into insights, and acting on those insights through intelligent orchestration. Scaling this model proved complex, as each customer has unique processes, tooling, and requirements—and onboarding occurs gradually rather than in a single, large rollout.

To support this growth model, Axians CS built the Axians Intelligence Platform, consisting of a central data lake, an agentic AI platform, and an integration hub. While this platform enabled the generation of insights, Axians CS also needed the ability to act on those insights in a controlled and scalable way.

This required an orchestration platform capable of strict customer isolation, support for multiple languages such as Python and Ansible, incremental scaling from early adopters to organization-wide adoption, and compliance with standards such as ISO, ISAE, and SOC 2.

Axians CS evaluated more than ten orchestration and automation platforms, including Kestra, Ansible Automation Platform, and n8n. While several solutions were technically capable, many relied on rigid, user-based, or device-based licensing models. These models required significant upfront investment and did not align with Axians CS' phased onboarding and usage-based growth strategy.

The solution

During proof-of-concept testing, Windmill scored 8.9 out of 10. The deciding factor was its architecture, which enabled Axians CS to scale orchestration gradually while preserving flexibility and control.

Multi-tenant workspace model

Windmill's workspace model allows Axians CS to create a fully isolated environment per customer, while still enabling controlled sharing of automation components where appropriate. Axians CS deliberately started with customers whose processes were more generalizable and expanded from there as more customer teams onboarded.

"You have a separate environment just for one customer where you can build all your automations and applications. We use Windmill Hub Private to share scripts between customers when appropriate and customize them for customer-specific logic."

— Ben Willems

The Windmill platform is centrally managed by the Axians CS platform team and hosted on Azure Kubernetes Services. Customer-facing teams—typically network engineers responsible for specific client accounts—build and maintain their own automations within their dedicated workspaces. The platform team provides infrastructure, security, and governance, while customer teams retain ownership of the orchestration logic.

This model allows Axians CS to respond quickly to customer-specific challenges without introducing a central development bottleneck. Because engineers are embedded in customer teams, they understand customer environments deeply and can translate requirements directly into orchestrated workflows. As a result, the automation library grows organically as early adopters develop use cases that others later reuse and adapt.

Usage-based pricing that enables scaling

A key enabler of this approach is Windmill's usage-based pricing model. Axians CS can start with a limited number of active customers and expand as adoption increases, without committing to fixed licensing costs upfront.

"The fact that the pricing of Windmill is based on actual usage aligns with the business value created. If adoption is high and many users are active, the cost of these licenses is also justified because more use cases are realized."

— Ben Willems

This economic model fundamentally changes how automation-as-a-service can be delivered. Developers build an orchestration once, and its value scales across teams and customers as others adopt it. Early adopters demonstrate value, and additional teams follow, supported by a cost structure that grows proportionally with usage.

Compliance as a driver for centralization

Compliance requirements further reinforced the need for a centralized orchestration platform. Axians CS' ISO, ISAE, and SOC 2 certifications require strict auditing, traceability, and logging.

Previously, engineers often ran scripts locally without consistent registration or guardrails. By adopting Windmill as the central orchestration platform, Axians CS ensured that every execution is logged, every change is traceable, and audit evidence is available by default.

"We needed to move away from engineers running scripts on their laptops without any guardrails or registration. With Windmill as our central orchestration platform, everything is audited, registered, and logged—giving us the visibility and compliance we need."

— Ben Willems

Rather than slowing down adoption, compliance became an accelerator, as new customers automatically inherit a compliant foundation from the moment they onboard.

Real-world transformation

The impact of this approach is tangible. In one example, a network engineer responsible for a customer needed to deploy internet connectivity across 100+ locations. By orchestrating the deployment through Windmill, the rollout time was reduced from approximately four hours per location to five to ten minutes.

The solution consisted of multiple smaller scripts written in different languages, such as Python and Ansible, orchestrated into a single flow. This provided full visibility into deployment status, improved error handling, and ensured consistent configuration across all locations.

"Back when we did not use Windmill, we had one large script that contained all the logic to deploy a customer. This was prone to errors and had no visibility on the status of the deployment. Now we create smaller scripts and orchestrate them, which gives us much more control over the entire deployment and the codebase behind it."

— Ben Willems

Flows like these are initially built by one team for a specific use case and later shared and adopted by other customer teams as they onboard. As adoption grows, the platform's value compounds.

The result

Axians CS started with early adopters and is now scaling orchestration across the organization. Many customer-facing teams actively build and operate automations on the platform, with additional teams onboarding as adoption spreads.

"You see that adoption is increasing. Where previously only technical people were thinking in terms of scripts, you now see business stakeholders also pushing for automation."

— Ben Willems

For teams actively using the platform, the results are significant:

• Network deployments that once took hours now complete in minutes
• Self-healing automations resolve incidents automatically
• Scheduled updates run consistently across customer environments
• Engineers spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on proactive improvements

Because engineers spend less time on repetitive operational tasks, they can focus on preventing incidents and helping customers gain insights from their infrastructure. This enables Axians CS to reduce customer impact proactively and create additional business value.

Conclusion

Axians CS demonstrates how managed service providers can scale orchestration and automation across a large and diverse customer base without compromising governance, compliance, or financial sustainability.

By adopting a multi-tenant platform with usage-based pricing, Axians CS avoided the high upfront costs of traditional enterprise automation platforms. As adoption expands across customer teams, costs scale proportionally, while customer-specific workspaces preserve flexibility and differentiation.

The key lesson for MSPs is clear: choose platforms that support your growth trajectory and organizational model—not just your current state.