FinOps Tool Vendors Adopt FOCUS

Key Insight: In addition to all major cloud infrastructure providers, third-party FinOps tool vendors are adopting FOCUS for their platforms. Thousands of Practitioners rely on these tools to perform FinOps in their organizations. To help Practitioners understand this landscape, the FinOps Foundation will continue to track vendor adoption, and will eventually offer an official certification signifying conformance with the FOCUS Specification.

Introduction

With the launch of FOCUS 1.0 and adoption of FOCUS by AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, FinOps Practitioners can now obtain and use FOCUS datasets for multi-cloud FinOps analysis. This source-agnostic billing standard is much-needed, as organizations must manage not just cloud infrastructure costs, but also SaaS, licensing, and on-premises costs. Some Practitioners rely heavily on third-party tools to assist with analysis of these costs, so we want to help the community understand which of their tools and service providers are adopting FOCUS.

Tracy Woo, Principal Analyst at Forrester, wrote in a recent blog:

CCMO vendors that don’t support FOCUS are standardizing on a soon to be antiquated process.

As organizations look to renew or find new tools and services to help them get the most out of their cloud investments, they’ll seek vendors who are aligning with this new billing standard.

Tracking FOCUS Adoption

Currently, the FinOps Foundation is tracking vendors who indicated to us that they have adopted FOCUS. The following article outlines what support entails for each of these vendors, based on information they have made publicly available.

To view the list of these tools, navigate to the finops.org/landscape, and select “FOCUS Adopter” from the left side menu. If you wish, you can further filter by Categories: Tools or Services.

If you are a FinOps tool or service vendor who has adopted FOCUS but are not listed below, please let us know so we can update this article and the FinOps Foundation Landscape.

FinOps Foundation Vendor Landscape

Future Certification for FOCUS Conformance

In the future, the FOCUS Steering Committee will define FOCUS Conformance Certification criteria for FinOps vendors and cloud vendors. The FOCUS Conformance Certification process will evaluate those who generate or consume FOCUS datasets for alignment with the requirements in the FOCUS Specification. The FinOps Foundation will perform this evaluation of a vendor’s ability to do such things as:

• Ingest FOCUS-formatted datasets
• Use FOCUS terms and concepts in the platform’s user interface and reports
• Deliver FOCUS-formatted billing data as an output
• Deliver its own billing data to customers in FOCUS format
• Demonstrate features and functionality that solve FinOps Use Cases
• Provide clear and transparent documentation of data content

We expect the FOCUS Conformance Certification program to be announced next year. Until this time, the FinOps Landscape will indicate those Tool Vendors that have announced any adoption of support for the FOCUS Specification. This information will be updated once the details of the conformance certification program are available.

The Vendor Landscape

At the time of publication, the following list of vendor Members – in alphabetical order – indicated to the FinOps Foundation that they have adopted FOCUS. The FinOps Foundation has not vetted these claims or reviewed these vendors for the upcoming vendor conformance program. (Check here to view the the latest list in the FinOps Landscape.)

Amnic

In July 2024, Amnic announced that their Global Steam on Cost Analyzer has been updated to align with FOCUS. Their website was also updated with the same language.

CloudBolt

In June 2024, CloudBolt announced a “reimagined FinOps Data Platform” that “aligns with the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS open data standard.” The article states that CloudBolt is “natively adopting the FOCUS data schema, common metric definitions, and taxonomies directly within our platform.”

CloudMonitor

CloudMonitor notes support for FOCUS 1.0 on their product roadmap under the Q3 2024 header. They also discuss this FOCUS adoption (via Azure billing data) in this demo video at the 8:30 mark.

Cloudsaver

In June 2024, Cloudsaver published an article stating that “FOCUS™ is seamlessly integrated into the Cloudsaver Platform.” The Cloudsaver website was also updated to indicate that “within the Cloudsaver Platform, FOCUS enhances financial management capabilities.”

CloudZero

On June 20, 2024, CloudZero issued a press release announcing the release of a new FOCUS integration with AnyCost™. Their FOCUS Adaptor is “enabling FinOps professionals to easily ingest, analyze, and manage cost data from any FOCUS data source.”

Envisor

Back in November 2023, Envisor announced support for FOCUS, stating that “Envisor supports FOCUS files and uses FOCUS terminology where relevant.”

Exivity

Exivity shares on the integrations page of their website that Exivity can ingest FOCUS data using the Exivity FOCUS Schema Mapper template.

Flexera

Flexera’s Cloud Cost Optimization ingests billing data that is in the FOCUS format. You can find more information about this capability in the product documentation.

IBM Cloudability

On June 12, 2024, IBM Cloudability launched beta support for ingesting any FOCUS cost and usage billing data.

Kion

On June 20, 2024, Kion announced “support within its platform to allow customers to use FOCUS as their preferred billing file.”

OpenCost

OpenCost, a CNCF open source project by KubeCost, announced a new plugin framework that “is flexible enough to allow for cost monitoring from a wide range of tools and services,” including support for costs in the FOCUS format. Read about OpenCost plugins here.

Sedai

Sedai supports FOCUS with the ability to ingest FOCUS-formatted cost and usage data, “allowing FinOps practitioners to perform fundamental FinOps capabilities using a common data schema.”

Spot by NetApp

Spot by NetApp supports FOCUS in both Billing Engine and Cost Intelligence “to ingest and normalize cost data from cloud providers.”

Surveil

Surveil’s FinOps Solution Brief states that their platform ingests data from multiple sources using FOCUS 1.0 standards.

Ternary

Back in November 2023, Ternary announced a revamped reporting engine that marks FOCUS fields with a FinOps Foundation logo. Ternary uses FOCUS nomenclature wherever possible.

Vantage

Vantage launched support for Custom Providers, allowing customers to import costs by providing a CSV that adheres to the FinOps FOCUS schema, or by posting records to the Vantage API. Read the product documentation for more information.

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (Broadcom)

Broadcom’s VMware Tanzu CloudHealth released a FOCUS FlexReport template in March 2024 that converts cloud billing data to the FOCUS format and renders graphical visualizations of the data.

YäRKEN

On May 17, 2024, YäRKEN announced that their platform “supports the ingestion of FOCUS files and enables the conversion of non-FOCUS cost and usage files into the FOCUS format.”

Next Steps for Practitioners

FinOps Practitioners can start to familiarize themselves with FOCUS data in a number of ways:

• Talk with your preferred cloud software vendors and encourage them to begin or deepen their adoption of FOCUS.
• Browse the FOCUS Column Library and the Use Case Library with SQL queries to get familiar with the metrics and terminology in the Specification.
• Enroll in the FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst course to learn how to leverage FOCUS datasets to answer key FinOps questions.
• Enable FOCUS datasets from cloud service providers and let us know about updates you may require.

Next Steps for Vendors

The largest Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are already generating FOCUS-formatted billing files, and these vendors continue to adopt FOCUS terminology in their platforms and align their APIs to the requirements in the Specification. But FOCUS goes beyond CSP adoption; many FinOps tool vendors support FOCUS data ingestion, and some are generating reports using FOCUS attributes and metrics. All CSPs and FinOps tool vendors should aim for full alignment with FOCUS.

All cloud software vendors will eventually be called upon to adopt FOCUS, as a growing number of FinOps teams are managing costs beyond public cloud, including SaaS and license costs, private cloud costs, and costs from other technology data sources. We encourage all cloud vendors to:

• Familiarize themselves with v1.0 of the Specification
• Get trained and certified on FOCUS
• Contribute to further development of the spec to support additional datasets

Stay tuned next year for the official certification signifying conformance with the FOCUS Specification.

Author

Vasilio Markanastasakis

FinOps Foundation