The way organizations manage technology investments is undergoing a fundamental shift. For years, ITAM and FinOps teams have operated in silos —ITAM focused on compliance for large software publishers, while FinOps has managed cloud costs. But with SaaS sprawl and the explosion of AI applications driving an exponential increase in cloud resource consumption, this siloed approach to managing technology costs no longer makes sense. Enterprises need continuous, real-time visibility into their technology spend, from cloud resources to software licenses, to ensure they’re optimizing costs without sacrificing agility.
FinOps is the fastest growing discipline for cloud cost management, yet the challenges it seeks to solve—spend visibility, optimization, governance—extend far beyond the cloud.
Flexera’s strategic alignment with FinOps and the future of technology spend optimization
We recently acquired Spot by NetApp to expand our capabilities in multi-cloud cost optimization and FinOps for AI. Yet, many organizations still struggle to answer fundamental questions like, “What technology services are we using?” and “Why are our cloud costs so high?” Our acquisition of Spot reinforces our commitment to providing organizations with a comprehensive view of their technology spend and risk across the entire IT landscape. This will allow organizations and partners to:
- Migrate workloads to the cloud efficiently.
- Purchase cloud instances with optimized pricing.
- Continuously monitor and optimize cloud costs.
- Achieve best-in-class container cost management.
Image credit: The FinOps Foundation
The expanding role of FinOps
The FinOps Foundation recently highlighted the rapid evolution of FinOps with the FinOps Foundation’s Scopes initiative, which extends the FinOps framework beyond public cloud to encompass SaaS and data centers. This shift reflects a broader industry trend: cost management can no longer be confined to cloud resources alone. According to a FinOps Foundation poll, a majority of FinOps practitioners across the globe are already managing SaaS and other technology costs in addition to public cloud spending:
Image and Research Credits: FinOps Foundation September 2024 Poll Results
SaaS management is at the top of the list. And while SaaS is the first non-cloud component in the FinOps framework, optimizing SaaS shares many challenges with public cloud environments. SaaS applications are often acquired outside traditional procurement channels, such as through cloud marketplaces or with corporate credit cards. According to the 2025 IT Priorities Report, 68% of IT decision-makers say that their business units are procuring far more cloud and SaaS than IT knows about.
This results in “shadow SaaS,” much like the shadow IT issues we’ve been addressing in cloud environments. SaaS pricing structures vary widely: they may be based on consumption, users/devices, flat rates, or even tied to additional features of another related service. In the same report, 26% of leaders think they are overspending on SaaS applications.
But accurately tracking SaaS usage and managing the variety of licensing and pricing models can be complex and error-prone, leading to challenges with both cost optimization and license compliance. That’s where Flexera’s SaaS Management solution, paired with our cloud license management capabilities, steps in. Together, they allow you to:
- Gain visibility into your SaaS usage, pricing models, and licensing terms.
- Align SaaS data with cloud usage of those applications.
- Identify overlap, where a SaaS license purchased outside the cloud provider can be leveraged on a cloud resource, eliminating the need for an additional vendor license.
This optimization—often known as Bring Your Own License (BYOL), as opposed to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO)—offers the potential for significant savings. For example, utilizing BYOL within the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit model allows organizations to repurpose existing licenses, avoiding unnecessary spending.
The role of FinOps in data center optimization
Looking back at the FinOps Foundation poll, we also see around 40% of FinOps professionals are now involved in optimizing data center resources. In the past, organizations have followed a “tech refresh” model, replacing hardware every 3-5 years to reduce support issues and stay aligned with technological advances. However, this approach is both costly and inefficient.
Now that the FinOps framework extends to data centers, the focus is on:
- Enabling consumption-based usage and cost modeling for better forecasting.
- Aligning usage predictions and procurement with IT operations.
- Optimizing workload placement to balance cost and performance.
Flexera plays a key role in this area and our leadership in ITAM provides a unique advantage. Our cloud migration solution helps customers assess their on-premises or data center resource usage. We provide detailed analysis of how these resources interact with the applications they support by mapping the business functions and identifying the interdependencies of resources and applications within the data center. Additionally, we offer cost estimations for migrating these on-premises workloads to the cloud and provide recommendations for optimizing costs across different cloud providers.
What this all means for organizations and their leaders
The days of separate ITAM and FinOps conversations are coming to an end. As enterprises increasingly rely on hybrid environments, CIOs, CFOs, and IT leaders need a comprehensive strategy that ensures not only financial governance but also effective asset optimization. The future lies in a platform-driven approach that unifies ITAM and FinOps, enabling IT teams to:
- Gain accurate and real-time insights into their technology spend.
- Ensure compliance while maintaining flexibility in cloud consumption.
- Optimize both software licensing and cloud cost efficiency.
While FinOps has emerged as a critical discipline to optimize cloud spend, ITAM remains foundational for managing software and hardware costs on-premises and in SaaS environments. Although FinOps is often associated with agility and speed in managing cloud resources, ITAM ensures accountability and compliance across all technology investments. Organizations increasingly recognize that true cost optimization requires a holistic view—one that integrates the granular tracking of ITAM with the financial discipline of FinOps. We see these disciplines not as separate silos but as complementary forces working together to shape the future of tech cost management and governance.
As a leader in the ITAM space for decades, focused on enabling organizations to optimize their technology spend, we closely monitored the FinOps discipline as it began to evolve and take shape. We quickly realized the growing need for cross-disciplinary collaboration between ITAM and FinOps and have designed and developed our products to excel in these areas. Flexera’s FinOps solutions cover all FinOps Scopes, including cloud, SaaS, data center, and software licensing. We also support organizations at every stage of their FinOps journey—whether they are just starting (crawl), developing best practices (walk), or implementing advanced strategies (run).
