FinOps X Europe 2024 – Day Two Session Highlights

In this overview we highlight sessions that we’ve visited during the conference. Overall the quality of the sessions has been very high and from speaking with a lot of other attendees we got many more recommendations for sessions to catch on the FinOps Foundation‘s Youtube channel when they get released. Chalk Talks or “Ask the Expert” sessions were not recorded as they are intended to be interactive.

Implementing FOCUS for Cloud Cost Exchange between European Union Institutions

Next up was a session by members of the European Parliament and how standardisation using the FOCUS format improved automation, accuracy, usability and scalability. Great news for European tax payers that they are working with other departments of the European Union to further implement this standard.

FinOps Success Is a Team Sport

ASML (Julián Debenedetti) was also present together with their vendor Flexera with a session about their journey into the Cloud and how FinOps was introduced to get in control of their Cloud spent. The accompanying graph clearly showed the point where FinOps practices were adopted, showing a stop to the steep incline of Cloud cost and even a decline over time.

Automating Anomaly Investigation with AI

Two representatives (Jan Peeters and Benjamin van der Maas) from the FinOps team at Johnson & Johnson presented their solution for their challenges with anomaly investigation. First using automation, then filtering and lastly a layer of AI / LLM on top they have managed to reduce the human workload related to anomaly management and increase the ability to follow up on anomalies that are classified as potentially problematic. With the scale of the J&J estate and the modest size of the FinOps team (relative to the 130.000 strong workforce at Johnson & Johnson and the estate across four cloud providers and many thousands of cloud accounts / subscriptions that needs to be managed) a truly impressive achievement.

The Ultimate Business Value Indicator for Senior Leaders

We had the pleasure of connecting with Anderson Oliveira, who presented a session about the marriage between Project Management and FinOps, using Earned Value Analysis techniques such as the CPI (Cost Performance Index) to determine the value of the cloud spent. This enables businesses to take informed decisions based on the value the functionality of the cloud delivers, instead of only focusing on bringing down the costs.

As with all the sessions on Tuesday there were many that we wanted to attend but had to miss or because everybody else also wanted to see it filling up the large studio rooms to max capacity and beyond. Sessions that we’ve heard very positive feedback about were those from Krisztian Borbely from Amadeus (“Moving from Cloud Cost Police to Cloud Cost Orchestrator”) and Kumar YB from Heineken (“Let’s Extend FOCUS: Defining the Future of Private Cloud Cost Management”). We’ll be sure to check them out when they get released.