Dive Brief:
- The FinOps Foundation updated its FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification cloud cost management tool on Thursday to better account for multiprovider workflows.
- FOCUS 1.3 adds a dataset for contractual commitments and negotiated agreements, columns that track how costs are split across workloads, and metadata visibility into the recency and completeness of cloud spend and usage reporting, the nonprofit trade association and Linux Foundation affiliate said in the announcement.
- "FOCUS 1.3 goes deeper to unpack shared cost allocations, enables a broader swath of providers to support the specification, adds a new contract dataset that can be permissioned separately from cost and usage data, and helps shine light on the freshness of data," FinOps Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment said in the press release.
Dive Insight:
Tech providers are on the alert as cloud and AI adoption drive up enterprise IT budgets. Efforts to link cost to value — a central tenet of FinOps — have gained momentum in the cloud and adjacent industries.
"We're living in a happily hybrid world, where big companies have three or four cloud providers, smaller companies might have two, and then they also have some data center and SaaS and licensing," Storment told Channel Dive. "Focus is meant to pull together all that mess and make it easier to calculate value and tie it back to the business."
As cloud's pay-as-you-go, usage-based pricing model spread from infrastructure to software and AI services, FOCUS expanded its number-crunching capabilities to SaaS and platform services this year. The organization has an initiative underway to add data center spend to the cost-tracking menu.
The Foundation's efforts have garnered backing from the largest hyperscalers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft. The group welcomed AMD, Nvidia, Snowflake and Service Now to its growing ranks in May.
FinOps practices have also gained traction among channel partners, according to Alex Smith, VP of channel research and practice operations at The Futurum Group. Cloud financial operational assessments are "a key offering to get them in the door in a more strategic way," Smith said in a March LinkedIn post.
The trend took hold as large value added resellers brought cloud into portfolios previously devoted to on-prem hardware and software.
"They can't operate off of pure resale margin," Smith told Channel Dive. "The economics don't really work in cloud. "You have to have a suite of advisory and professional services that accompany cloud provisioning and FinOps is one of those key offerings."
Accenture, Deloitte and EY are FinOps Foundation premier members.
"The biggest GSIs who do technology and professional services have strong FinOps practices that they are bringing into the big enterprises," Storment said. "Midsize MSPs and resellers who are supporting the longer-tail customers have FinOps practices and tooling and services they're bringing into that group. The ones who are really mature have it integrated into engineering, finance, procurement … and they're augmenting it with services, tooling and technology."
