FinOps X Americas 2025: Live show report day 1

Blended brew of billing data 

The FinOps Foundation points out that billing data from cloud hyperscalers, cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors, software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors… and other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) all stream into a cloud-centric organisation every day.

But, all that billing data creates a fair degree of white noise. Why?

Because each vendor employs unique terminology, taxonomy and technical metrics in their billing file, which slows FinOps systems (and indeed practitioners) down due to the time it takes to ingest and normalise data. Things get even tougher when a new cloud vendor is added to any given IT stack as “a new schema must be developed” to transform cost and usage data into an organisation’s own proprietary format. 

According to the FinOps Foundation, “FOCUS normalises cost and usage billing data from different sources, reducing the amount of work needed to begin FinOps analysis and enabling businesses to refocus that energy on activities that are more strategic and worthwhile.”

Onto & into FinOps X

At the FinOps X show itself, the keynotes, presentations and breakouts concentrated on showcasing, explaining and deconstructing FOCUS. Many of the sessions looked at planning for, estimating, allocating, optimising and reporting on the cost of AI services that have token-based usage and cost models.

In the realm of Cloud+ (the foundation’s effort to make FinOps span a scope that also includes AI and SaaS services and more at every level), FinOps practitioners are managing technology spend, including SaaS, licensing, datacenter costs and private cloud costs.

Logically enough, the FinOps Foundation also concentrated on cloud sustainability. There were sessions at this conference designed to help FinOps staff (across software engineering and business) to develop skills, including cloud carbon forecasting and budgeting while understanding the potential trade-offs with cost.

Keynote noteworthies

Executive director of the FinOps Foundation J.R. Storment kicked off the show by reminding us that in the “pre-datacenter pre-cloud” days, we used to exist in a world with fixed IT costs. Thinking about the emergence of FinOps as a formalized role (around 2019) he detailed the rise of the first formalised FinOps Framework (in 2021) and the subsequent arrival of FinOps for containers (2022) and FOCUS version 0.5 a year later… and the way through to FinOps for AI in the current year 2025 today.

“FinOps now touches two trillion dollars worth of global spend,” said Storment. “We’re now at a point where the business strategy and the technology strategy [inside any company] needs to work to inform the FinOps strategy. FinOps feeds cost and usage data both up and down the business and technology stack in order to create a virtuous system or architectural efficiencies.”

Banking on COIN in FinOps

Detailing more of what the foundation means by FinOps Scope for efficient cloud, Storment focused on the need for organisations to concentrate on cloud spend optimisation. 

The COIN (Cost Optimisation INdex) is a quantitative measure that works in this space and is designed to measure efficiency. It is a score assigned to all applications with a cloud presence to compare every app’s “optimisation opportunities” (which would often be low-hanging fruit actions such as rightsizing, managing underutilised or idle compute resources, including containers) and comparing those entities to their spend to rank their overall efficiency via a dashboard.

Presenting customers in this keynote featured FinOps leaders from organisations including MGM Resorts. With so much glitz at the front end of what MGM does (in Las Vegas especially), speakers explained how much work goes on at the back end to look after performance, software (and cloud) licensing and IT sustainability.

FinOps for AI (not AI for FinOps)

Moving to talk about AI (what keynote doesn’t feature AI?), Storment addressed the difference between FinOps for AI and AI for FinOps. While AI for FinOps might be able to help FinOps, the foundation is today more focused on FinOps for AI i.e. FinOps functions designed to help organisations manage the oh-so-variable and non-deterministic nature of AI & ML models and how they actually execute.

The FinOps Foundation reminds us that FOCUS is in its third year of development and has it has gained critical adoption by numerous Cloud Service Providers including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. It is at the point we can say that FinOps practitioners around the world are actively using FOCUS billing datasets to inform business decision-making and optimise their organisations’ use of technology across many Scopes of practice.

Let’s remember again that Scopes is more than a single type of infrastructure, we need to think of it as follows…

• A Scope may operate across multiple types of infrastructure (e.g. AI or licensing).
• There may be multiple Scopes within a single type of spend (e.g. public cloud).
• Unique KPIs and thresholds for metrics may be associated with a capability in a Scope, even if that capability is included in other Scopes

“The 1.2 release of the FOCUS specification introduces new columns that enable expansion to SaaS and PaaS vendor billing data, paving the way for the FOCUS open standard to be the primary format for cost and usage billing data across the industry. Community support is critical, and we encourage vendors and FinOps Practitioners to attend FOCUS community calls, share feedback and join the FOCUS Project,” noted the FinOps Foundation.

What comes next?

FOCUS contributors and the steering committee welcome feature requests for consideration in the next FOCUS 1.3 and future releases. 

Future versions of the FOCUS Specification will aim to further deepen support for cloud and SaaS billing data, as well as broaden support to additional Scopes of spending.