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TCP-Talks: Focus on Value: How FinOps Transformed from Cost Cops to Business Enablers

TCP-Talks: Focus on Value: How FinOps Transformed from Cost Cops to Business Enablers

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 For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley is joined by four distinguished guests from the FinOps Foundation following the recent FinOps X conference in San Diego. Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, Graham Murphy, and the TCP team dive deep into the evolution of FinOps from pure cloud cost management to the broader “Cloud Plus” world, the rapid adoption of Focus 1.2, and how AI is transforming both what we manage and how we manage it. About Our Guests Rob Martin has been with the FinOps Foundation for four years, currently focusing on the AI working group, ITAM initiatives, and the rapidly growing public sector adoption. His experience spans training development and strategic initiatives that have helped shape the foundation’s direction during a period of explosive growth. Mike Fuller is one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation and co-author of the Cloud FinOps book. As a member of the Focus project steering committee, he’s been instrumental in developing the specification that’s standardizing cloud billing data across the industry. Graham Murphy serves as Director of SaaS P&L for Technology One in Brisbane. With 8-9 years in FinOps and recently nominated as both a FinOps Ambassador and Focus Ambassador, Graham brings a practitioner’s perspective from the APAC region and insights on implementing Focus in a SaaS environment. Conference Growth and Evolution The 2025 FinOps X conference in San Diego marked a significant milestone with approximately 2,000 attendees—a substantial increase from the previous year. Despite the larger venue, the conference maintained its intimate feel, allowing for meaningful connections and knowledge sharing. 2:49 Graham: “AI definitely grew a lot this year. A lot more talk about how you go about managing AI, how FinOps is going to drive better value out of your AI investments. And also just a lot of people trying to understand where to start.” The conference format evolved with more senior leadership participation, including executives from PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, and Nubank sharing their FinOps journeys. The quality of presentations notably improved, with practitioners willing to share deeper insights into their mature FinOps programs. The Cloud Plus Revolution A dominant theme throughout the conference was the expansion beyond traditional cloud cost management into what the foundation calls “Cloud Plus”—encompassing SaaS, data center, licensing, and AI costs. 4:31 Mike: “We saw that sort of echoed quite well across many of the breakout sessions by practitioners exactly how they’re sort of incorporating other costs into the conversation of their practices.” 6:56 Rob: “Ticketmaster said something that I loved, which was that they were ‘happily hybrid’… we understand that we’ve got all these different modalities that we’re going to use to deliver value—SaaS models and data center models and cloud models.” This shift represents a fundamental change in how organizations view FinOps, moving from a cloud-specific practice to a comprehensive IT financial management approach. Focus 1.2: The Game Changer The release of Focus 1.2 at the conference marked a pivotal moment for billing data standardization. The specification now includes support for SaaS costs and virtual currencies like tokens and credits—critical for AI and modern consumption-based pricing models. 16:23 Mike: “The big tagline for Focus 1.2 was sort of keeping up with how FinOps is approaching that Cloud Plus world with the introduction of columns that really help bring in SaaS costs.” Focus Adoption Momentum The adoption curve for Focus has been remarkable: 19:53 Rob: “Last year, people were saying ‘Tell me what is Focus?’ In Barcelona, they asked ‘How do I actually start using it?’ This year, almost every conversation was ‘I’m trying to get my data into Focus, and this is how we’re doing it.'” Major milestones include: AWS and Microsoft announcing Focus 1.2 supportGrafana, Databricks, and Snowflake joining as data generatorsEuropean Union standardizing on Focus for inter-agency billingUK, Japanese, Canadian, and Brazilian governments adopting Focus as their standard AI: From Experimentation to Operation The transformation in AI cost management over the past year has been dramatic. Organizations have moved from wondering if they should worry about AI costs to actively managing significant AI spending. 13:31 Rob: “We’ve got private connections to some customers where we’re serializing 400 gigabits per second line rate to them, so that they can very, very rapidly move libraries of data to tightly schedule back to back with perhaps maybe a GPU farm instance.” The Dual AI Challenge Organizations face two distinct AI-related challenges: FinOps for AI: Managing the costs of AI workloads, including training, inference, and data movementAI for FinOps: Using AI to enhance FinOps practices through automation and intelligent recommendations ...
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