June 3, 2025 | Article: 5 minute read, 90-minute watch
KEY INSIGHT: FinOps X 2025 Day 1 Keynote brought together practitioners and leaders around the world to share how they’re advancing their practice with FinOps Enabled Executive Decisions. FinOps is now being applied to broader scopes of technology spend, including SaaS, PaaS, Data Centers, and Licensing. In addition, FOCUS™ 1.2 was announced, folding SaaS and PaaS billing data into the same schema as core cloud spend, with Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana now supporting FOCUS.
FinOps X 2025 recording sponsor IBM Cloudability.
J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, opened FinOps X 2025 with a reminder that the practice continues to advance and evolve into the Cloud+ Era. Highlighting FinOps Scopes, ways to apply the FinOps Framework to various segments of technology spend and usage data, to help practitioners continue to collaborate tighter with all layers of the organization, and enable executive decisions to align to key business objectives.
Ema Patki, SVP of Product and Platform Engineering and Diagnostics at Align Technology, presented us a look at Align’s evolution from cost-aware engineering into the Cloud+ world and enabling executive decisions. She discussed the management of unit costs, licensing, and AI as new scopes to apply FinOps best practices for their future.
Anthony Johnson, Lead Architect of Platform Economics at MGM Resorts International Inc., walked us through their Communications Scope, a quintessential example of FinOps leaders extending capabilities and best practices to manage other technology spend and usage data. He also showed us how he creates Health Checks to monitor various Scopes.
Thomas Hammer, Product Operations Lead at Nubank, reminded us that it’s all about the data– enabling optimization and unit economics. He shared how Nubank advances the level of granularity and scope of its Forecasting in order to better inform its business leaders and executives of cost-aware product decisions.
As we learn from the conference, AI advances quickly, alongside FinOps challenges that come with it. To help practitioners navigate these changes, we are launching FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI, a new education series and certification built to help you understand, manage, and optimize AI spend.
The content will be released in stages so you can start learning right away and stay current as the field evolves. Earn badges as you progress through levels and work toward full certification by March 2026. It’s a new way to learn FinOps—designed for the age of AI.
Loránt Kiss, Senior FinOps Manager, and Priyanka Pandey, Senior Cloud FinOps Manager, of Delivery Hero took to the stage to talk about their own FOCUS adoption and recommend how they empower SaaS vendors to adopt the specification.
Shawn Alpay, Working Group Chair for FOCUS, joined J.R. on stage to announce FOCUS 1.2. FOCUS 1.2 unifies “Cloud+” reporting for Practitioners by folding SaaS and PaaS billing data into the same schema as core cloud spend.
FOCUS 1.2 introduces an invoice ID column that links each row directly to provider invoices, streamlining charge-back and month-end close, and sharpens cost allocation with new billing account and sub account granularity. Three new providers also announced support; Alibaba Cloud, Databricks and Grafana.
Keena Blunschi of American Express moderated our annual Cloud VP panel sharing their perspectives on cloud, AI and the advancement of FinOps. Joining Keena on stage were James Greenfield, VP of AWS Platform Experience at AWS, Scott Hunter, VP Director of Product at Microsoft, Pravir Gupta, VP & GM of Google Cloud Business Platform at Google Cloud, and Manan Syal, VP of Software Development at Oracle.
FinOps X 2025 isn’t over yet. After this Keynote is a full day of Breakout sessions packed with practitioner stories, best practices, expertise, and interactive Chalk Talk workshops, alongside all of the deep conversations and connections the community will make. You can also follow the Day 2 Keynote, which is dedicated to FinOps for AI and AI for FinOps, on x.finops.org.
