FinOps X Europe Day 1 – Keynote

FinOps X Europe Day 1 – Keynote

Two and a half days of meetings, conversations and deep dive sessions at the FinOps Conference in Barcelona. These are our highlights and main takeaways from the Tuesday Keynote. We also have posts about the Keynote on day two and the session highlights for both days.

Keynote Highlights

The keynote started with a small experiment whereby everybody had to introduce themselves to the person or persons sitting next to them. The 30 seconds became a couple of minutes of noise and distraction but while J.R. Storment may not have realized it some great relationships were started in those first couple of minutes of the conference.

Afterwards the keynote kicked off properly with an overview of the quite spectacular growth in the #FinOps field (over 30.000 certified professionals worldwide) and at the FinOps Foundation itself (from 2 to 30 people in about four years).

Big updates from the keynote were the confirmation that FinOps is very rapidly moving to applications beyond the public cloud with 72% of responses in the ongoing State of FinOps survey pointing towards SaaS and 53% to licensing.

Other topics discussed during the keynote were:

• Shift Left: the need for FinOps data being included earlier in the decision making process. Similar to software testing where a bug found during development is 10x cheaper to fix than one found in production: the earlier in the process you can introduce data related to cost vs. value the earlier you can impact product decisions and improve business value / profitability.
• FinOps for AI: the need to start applying FinOps principles to managing the rapidly exploding cost of AI solutions. A good example of the expansion into XaaS.
• Sustainability: Similar to cost / value informed decision making companies are increasingly looking to include sustainability metrics. FinOps teams with their knowledge and capabilities are ideally placed to start including these metrics into their scope. A new set of metrics was recently released by the Sustainbility Special Interest Group.
• FinOps for Everybody: FinOps is increasingly involved in almost every aspect of running a (cloud-focused) business. Areas such as product development and innovation, pricing and profit margins, financial budgeting and planning, sustainability, security are all related to or benefit from the insights that FinOps can bring.

FOCUS 1.1

During the keynote we had the official announcement of the release of FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) 1.1 that was ratified by the FOCUS Steering Committee the week prior.

Main updates in FOCUS are improvements in metadata and new Columns that deepen support for billing data generated by cloud service providers. The addition of the ServiceSubcategory column being the one that was most talked about during different sessions at the conference but that also caused the most discussion within the FOCUS Workgroup when it was being defined.

A forward look to what we can expect for FOCUS 1.2 (scheduled to coincide with FinOps X 2025) is increased support beyond public cloud. A topic that also came back on Day 2.

Case Studies

Two FinOps cases were presented during the keynote. Natalie Daley, Global Head of Cloud Economics & FinOps at HSBC presented the state of FinOps at HSBC and gave insight into the developments over time and the shifts in priority for her organization.

Neven Drljević and Julian Radu, Drs. gave an insightful presentation about the implementation of FOCUS for the cloud usage brokerage that is done by the European Commission for the European Parliament and other EU organizations.

Check out these presentations when the YouTube recordings become available.