Accelerate Enterprise FinOps Adoption: Include AI, SaaS, and Data Centers from the Start

Key Insight: HealthEdge CTO Robert Duffy discusses the critical need to embed FinOps practices from the start of a major cloud migration, and how his recent FinOps initiative includes Scopes like SaaS, AI, and internal billing from the beginning.

Robert Duffy, CTO of HealthEdge, states that FinOps as a reactive measure, after costs spiral out of control, is a lost opportunity. Instead, Duffy and his organization are undergoing a massive cloud migration and are establishing FinOps practices across all its technology from the start.

This strategic move ensures the entire organization, from engineering teams to the businesses they support, goes through a comprehensive cloud-native transformation where they embed value-driven decision making as early as possible. These costs go beyond cloud and include other technology spending:

Internal Platforms & SaaS: FinOps Framework concepts will be leveraged for internal platform teams struggling with chargebacks and for driving value, increasing accountability, and leveraging cost models involved with the organization’s SaaS portfolio.
Data Centers: Even as the company’s data center costs “burn down” due to the cloud migration, FinOps practices are being applied to ensure transparency and a clear comparison between old and new costs.
AI and Agentic Systems: Teams who previously bought commercial off-the-shelf software are now demanding R&D and product development on AI and agentic systems, asking complex FinOps questions like, “What is the business case and value? What is the ROI? How much will it cost to run on the platform?”.

Duffy views AI as the most interesting and critical new layer to this migration effort, anticipating that its cost complexity will “blow up” at their organization. The productivity gains from AI are attracting non-traditional product personas like HR, finance, and sales to adopt tools quickly, and FinOps has a unique opportunity to be a central voice of connecting these new solutions to business value.

Duffy also shares his perspective on the cultural aspects of HealthEdge’s FinOps Adoption in this companion video.