The FinOps Certified Platform certification is available to FinOps Foundation members that build, license and deliver a commercial software product, or are founding maintainers of an open source FinOps tool project, with features that are aligned to the FinOps Framework Capabilities. A FinOps Platform enables FinOps Personas to perform activities and adopt FinOps best practices.
Please contact member-cert@finops.org to request a Request for Information (RFI) document and kickstart the certification process for your FinOps tool or FinOps professional services offering.
Required Criteria for Certification
Become a Member (Prerequisite)
Being a FinOps Foundation Member and Linux Foundation Member in good standing are prerequisites to becoming a FinOps Certified Platform.
Individual Certification Requirements
The FinOps Certified Platform certification requires individuals in your organization to have achieved FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified Professional certifications based on your organization’s size.
The following table outlines the number of certified individuals your organization requires for each type of certification. Note that one FinOps Certified Professional certification does not substitute for any FinOps Certified Practitioner certifications.
| FinOps Platform | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Company Size | FinOps Certified Practitioner | FinOps Certified Professional | FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst |
| 5,000 + | 100 | 5 | 30 |
| 500 – 4,999 | 50 | 3 | 15 |
| 100 – 499 | 10 | 2 | 3 |
| Less than 100 | 5 | 1 | 2 |
| The “Company Size” column in this table refers to the parent organization size that was used for defining your fee structure when you joined the Linux Foundation and counts are not based on the individual business unit. For example, a 100 person product team that is part of a 1,500 person organization would fall into the “500-4,999” individual certification requirement tier, and not the “100-499” individual certification requirement tier. | |||
FinOps Framework Requirements
The FinOps Framework provides the operating model for how to establish and excel in the practice of FinOps.
The FinOps Certified Platform certification requires publicly referenceable information about your product that highlights feature/functionality alignment to the Framework Capabilities and Supplemental Criteria outlined in the tables below, accompanied by a recorded demonstration of your product showcasing those FinOps Capabilities.
Each Framework Capability is assigned a FinOps tool criteria value that is weighted in the context for how software functionality enables that FinOps Capability for FinOps Personas. The criteria value is not a reflection of the FinOps Framework Capability’s value in the practice of FinOps.
FinOps tool features are evaluated and counted as a point-value based on (i) publicly referenceable evidence, along with (ii) a video recording of your product, demonstrating alignment with the corresponding FinOps Framework Capability. This means the FinOps tool feature/functionality is assessed as either meeting the Framework Capability criterion (full point-value) or not meeting it (zero point-value), with no intermediate point-value level.
The FinOps Certified Platform certification requires a FinOps tool to reach a threshold of [ 90% ] of the total possible required criteria points from combining the points achieved in the (i) Required Criteria for Certification section with the points achieved in the (ii) Supplemental Criteria section.
Understand Usage & Cost
How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Data Ingestion [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable collection, transfer, store, and normalization of data from various sources, with a goal of creating a complete, contextual dataset of technology usage and cost data available for analysis.
Allocation [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to assign and share technology costs using accounts, tags, labels, and other metadata, creating accountability among teams and projects within an organization.
Reporting & Analytics [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable analysis of technology related data for creating reports to gain insights into usage and spend patterns, identify opportunities for improvement, and support informed decision-making about technology resources.
Anomaly Management [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to detect, identify, alert and manage unexpected or unforecasted technology costs and usage irregularities in a timely manner to lower risk in cost-effective operations.
Quantify Business Value
How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Planning & Estimating [tool criteria points: 3]
Capability to estimate and explore potential cost and value of workloads in an organization’s technology environments for particular scenarios and models.
Forecasting [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to provide or create a model of the anticipated future cost and value of systems and services leveraging statistical methods, historical spend patterns, planned changes, and related metrics.
Budgeting [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability for setting limits, monitoring, and managing technology spending, aligned with business objectives, to ensure accountability and predictable financial outcomes for systems and services.
KPIs & Benchmarking [tool criteria points: 3]
Capability to evaluate resource optimization and value between parts of the organization or against industry peers to inform decision-making and align FinOps with business objectives.
Unit Economics [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to develop and track metrics that provide an understanding of how an organization’s technology use and management practices impact the value of the organization’s products, services, or activities.
Optimize Usage & Cost
How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
Architecting & Workload Placement [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability to enable design and modernization of solutions with cost-awareness and efficiency to maximize business value while achieving performance, scalability, and operational objectives.
Usage Optimization [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to analyze and optimize resources to match specific usage patterns while ensuring that workloads operate efficiently and generate sufficient business value for their cost.
Licensing & SaaS [tool criteria points: 3]
Capability to optimize the impact of software licenses and SaaS investments on an organization’s technology cost and value structure by understanding vendor-specific licensing terms, use rights, and pricing options, planning for appropriate use aimed to minimize over-deployment (a compliance risk) or under-deployment (shelfware/waste).
Rate Optimization [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable and manage resource rate efficiency through commitment discounts (RIs, Savings Plans, Committed Use Discounts), and other pricing mechanisms (Spot, interruptible VMs, cost aware region selection) to meet the organization’s operational and budgetary objectives.
Sustainability [tool criteria points: 3]
Capability of incorporating sustainability criteria and metrics into optimization, to ensure environmental efficiency is balanced with FinOps practices.
Manage the FinOps Practice
How does your software enable the following FinOps Capabilities for FinOps Personas?
FinOps Practice Operations [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability of enabling a FinOps culture and empowering the FinOps practice through the implementation of FinOps strategy and processes.
Executive Strategy Alignment [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability of enabling FinOps teams to partner with executive leaders to support executive strategy alignment of technology-related spend through clear decision support, shared accountability, and business-relevant measures.
FinOps Education & Enablement [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability of providing FinOps training, skill development, and practical activities that enable teams throughout the organization to adopt and deliver FinOps best practices.
Governance, Policy & Risk [tool criteria points: 3]
Capability to establish policies, controls and governance mechanisms to ensure that technology use aligns with business objectives, complies with regulatory requirements, and optimizes resources efficiently.
Invoicing & Chargeback [tool criteria points: 5]
Capability to enable invoice reconciliation workflows and chargeback models to align cost data and reporting to specific budgets and accounting requirements.
FinOps Assessment [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability to conduct repeatable, measurable analysis of the maturity of a FinOps practice in the context of the FinOps Framework for insights into strengths and areas for improvement of FinOps activities.
Intersecting Disciplines [tool criteria points: 1]
Capability to enable coordination of activities between FinOps and interconnected disciplines and Allied Personas (such as, ITAM, ITFM, Sustainability, Security).
Supplemental Criteria (Optional & Additional)
Does your software support the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), have a specific FinOps concentration, support multiple data providers, or meet relevant compliance requirements?
FinOps for Technology Categories [criteria points: 3 for each Technology Category]
This criteria is about enabling the practice of FinOps beyond public cloud.
Data Providers Supported [criteria points: 1 for each data provider]
This criteria includes public CSPs (like Google, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc), data cloud providers (Snowflake, Databricks, etc), SaaS, data center, and private cloud infrastructure (like OpenStack, etc).
Compliances [criteria points: 3 for each compliance]
This criteria includes compliances for FedRAMP, GDPR, SOC 1 (Type I or II), SOC 2 (Type I or II), ISO 27001
Technology Concentration [criteria points: 10]
This criteria is for FinOps tools and professional service providers whose software functionality or consulting services exclusively concentrate on a single specific technology (like K8s, or storage optimization for data lakehouses, or automated provisioning/management of interruptible VMs, etc…), or single specific FinOps activity.
FOCUS Adoption [criteria points: 10]
Publicly referenceable information indicating your FinOps Platform supports FOCUS by having adopted a version of the FOCUS specification to enable functionality for producing and/or importing and/or exporting FOCUS datasets. FOCUS is an open-source specification that normalizes cost and usage datasets across vendors and reduces complexity for FinOps Practitioners.
Community Engagement [criteria points: 5]
The FinOps Foundation is here to advance the people who do FinOps. Provide information that satisfies the following criteria:
- FinOps Foundation member profile page lists 3 publicly referenceable customer case studies.
- Participation by a member of your organization in the FinOps Foundation’s #tooling-new-features-vendor Slack channel for feature updates to the community.
Questions?
Visit the FinOps Tool & Services Certification Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
