J.R. Storment
FinOps Foundation
Key Insight: Day 2 of FinOps X Europe was full of FinOps, FOCUS, and sustainability content. We were reminded that while a lot of organizations have been on their FinOps journeys for many years, others are still getting started. FOCUS is making an impact already today, but there is unlimited potential for the Specification to support additional use-cases in the future, such as normalizing carbon emissions data. Join us in San Diego in June 2025 for another engaging event where we will see how all of these topics are evolving.
Watch the full recording of Day 2 Keynote from FinOps X Europe in Barcelona in November 2024.
Sustainability Panel: The intersection of cost and carbon
Bindu Sharma (Teradata), Natalie Daley (HSBC), Mathijs Hendriks (Rabobank), and Ferran Grau Horta (Adevinta) came together for a panel discussion on cloud sustainability and its intersection with FinOps. The panel dove into tough questions like, “How do you reconcile a conflict between cost and carbon optimization?”. Each panelist shared how they are addressing the associated challenges today.
The goal is to display carbon data alongside cost data to engineering teams as they build and deploy applications (i.e., “shift left”), but a core challenge standing in the way is unifying carbon data from different sources. There is a potential for FOCUS to help standardize carbon emissions data for the industry in the future.
Read: FinOps and Sustainability Teams Collaborate to Optimize Carbon
Watch this section of the keynote.
Renault Group implements FinOps for significant savings
Frederic Mingot, Head of Connected Car Platform Operations at Renault Group, talked with us about how Renault gained control of cloud costs that were four times higher than anticipated after the launch of their Connected Car Platform. Renault implemented a dedicated FinOps team to achieve significant savings: a 24X reduction in cost over three years.
Watch this section of the keynote.
STMicroelectronics establishes parallel FOCUS data flow
Pierre-Emmanuel Nuiry, Director of Cloud Financial Operations at STMicroelectronics, is leveraging the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) to unify data from multiple clouds. He recommends establishing a FOCUS data flow in parallel with your existing process while you transition to its standardized language and metrics. FOCUS greatly simplified their operations and enabled Finance to use one process for chargeback. Pierre-Emmanuel plans to transition to FOCUS as their primary data flow starting in January 2025.
Watch this section of the keynote.
FOCUS Maintainer Panel: Naming things is hard
Shawn Alpay, the new Chair of the FOCUS working group, led a panel discussion with three FOCUS Maintainers: Karl Kraft (Walmart), Irena Jurica (Neos), and Larry Advey (Twilio). Collectively, these panelists have dedicated thousands of hours to the development of the FOCUS Specification, and so they came to the stage to share stories from the trenches with all of us.
Irena admitted that just two years ago, she was skeptical that major cloud service providers would come together to agree on a single format for billing files. But after seeing their fervent interest in FOCUS, Irena assured listeners that their similar skepticism about SaaS vendors coming together for the next iteration of the Specification can be laid to rest.
Karl gave his version of the elevator pitch on “Why FOCUS?”, highlighting that with FOCUS you can understand your cost data on day one, and you can easily incorporate new Scopes of billing data when your environment inevitably changes.
Larry talked about the diversity of representation across Practitioners, cloud service providers, and other cloud software vendors in the FOCUS Maintainer group, which will be critical for the expansion of the Specification to support a variety of needs from both billing data generators and consumers.
Shawn shared a fun story about the group’s challenges with agreeing on names for some concepts. A short-term fix for the group has been to call these difficult-to-name-concepts “potatoes.” For those digging into the Spec, you’ll find Potato in the Glossary, just to give you a smile.
Watch this section of the keynote.
AWS expresses their commitment to FinOps
AWS made their debut at FinOps X earlier this year in San Diego with a much-anticipated announcement of their support for FOCUS. This month, John Phillips, Director of Product and Engineering for AWS’s FinOps products, joined us in Barcelona to express AWS’s commitment to FinOps. John explained how FinOps is fully-aligned with AWS’s commitment to helping their customers get the most out of their cloud spend. John also teased that he will have some FinOps product announcements at the upcoming AWS re:Invent conference during the first week of December 2024. Stay tuned!
Watch this section of the keynote.
Microsoft discusses FinOps in the era of AI
Cyril Belikoff, Vice President of Microsoft Azure and Industry Clouds, joined us to talk about FinOps in the era of AI, particularly about how Generative AI is being leveraged to democratize FinOps data for non-technical stakeholders. Users can ask questions using natural language in Microsoft Fabric, and CoPilot will deliver an answer. In this way, GenAI can help us make an analysis of tradeoffs between performance and cost.
Read: Clouds announce FOCUS support and GenAI tools at FinOps X
Watch this section of the keynote.
FinOps X 2025
Finally, J.R. revealed the dates for the next global FinOps X conference: June 2 – 5, 2025 in San Diego, California. Register here. We hope to see you there!
Watch this section of the keynote.
Check out the Day 1 Keynote recap!
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