Trade associations announce strategic partnership
Last week, the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum—global trade associations for their respective functions—announced a new partnership. Together, they will help break down silos that have been building since the introduction of cloud operations to enterprise IT organizations.
The ITAM Forum, established in 2020, enables individuals who focus on hardware and software IT asset management (ITAM) for organizations that run IT operations in their own data centers. Their goal is to help drive business value through the optimization of technology usage and cost.
The FinOps Foundation was established around the same time to achieve the same ends in the realm of public cloud operations, where decentralized decision-making by engineering teams drives usage and cost that must be tied back to business outcomes. (FinOps = Finance + DevOps).
A tale of two teams
The practices of FinOps and ITAM have operated much like their respective IT operations: in silos that separate people, processes, tools, and budgets. Despite their common goal, it’s not uncommon for FinOps and ITAM teams within the same organization to not even know that each other exists.
I will never forget seeing this funny (albeit awkward) scenario play out at an IT industry conference: the speaker—who had a long history and established connections in both ITAM and FinOps—was presenting to a mixed audience about the need to bridge this gap. He asked FinOps professionals in the room to stand up and raise their hands if their organization also has an ITAM function. Not many hands went up. They took their seats, and the speaker then asked ITAM professionals to stand up and raise their hands if their organization also had a FinOps function. Again, only a few hands were raised.
The speaker chuckled, realizing that folks were standing up to represent their functions without any knowledge that their very own colleagues were also at this conference, sitting in the same room.
The speaker then proceeded to introduce FinOps practitioners and ITAM professionals from the same company to each other. It was an incredible display of the deep silos that exist within large organizations.
What does this partnership mean for practitioners?
This partnership between the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum aims to tear down these organizational walls. They aim to bring the whole community together through events, working groups and social networks. FinOps practitioners and ITAM professionals will discuss common problems, educate each other and establish best practices for working together to accomplish their shared goal: driving business value through investments in technology resources and services.
The changing landscape: FinOps and ITAM overlap
The 2025 State of FinOps Report found that FinOps teams are being asked to manage additional IT costs beyond IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, a.k.a. “cloud”) costs; specifically, SaaS, licenses, private cloud and data center costs. ITAM teams have traditionally managed much of this IT spending. However, as the presence and power of FinOps teams optimizing cloud costs in near-real time becomes more apparent, business leaders are asking FinOps practitioners to provide their finer-grained visibility for other areas of spend – so they can move beyond financial reporting and into active technology management. Further, the technology landscape is increasingly shifting to usage-based pricing, which generates a high volume of cost and usage billing data that FinOps practitioners are adept at handling.
With a proven track record of helping IT teams reduce costs, mitigate risks and facilitate innovation, ITAM professionals have much to contribute. In addition to managing hardware assets and improving performance throughout their lifecycle, ITAM professionals ensure your organization is using software licenses in accordance with the terms and conditions outlined in contractual agreements, helping to avoid hefty fines or penalties. Software asset management includes understanding license terms, tracking software usage, and seeking legal or consulting advice if needed. These activities have traditionally been outside the scope of FinOps practices, but ITAM is also starting to overlap. The 2024 Sate of ITAM Report found that, in addition to managing privately owned hardware and software assets throughout their lifecycles, almost two-thirds (63%) of advanced ITAM professionals are tracking the use of software licenses in the public cloud. Also, organizations reported that a whopping 88% now include an ITAM professional in their CCOE (Cloud Center of Excellence).
How will businesses benefit?
FinOps and ITAM professionals all share a common goal: to ensure that technology assets are used efficiently, maximizing the value of IT investments that, in turn, create business value. There is much to be gained from fostering collaboration between these two siloed domains, shedding light on their overlap, and learning each other’s terminology.
It’s hard for leadership to make strategic decisions without a complete picture of technology usage and cost in the organization. CIOs and CTOs today are juggling hybrid infrastructure and need holistic data to make informed decisions about where to move or build workloads and applications. Leaders must consider their goals and costs of building on-premises vs. in the cloud, migrating to the cloud and/or repatriating back to the data center. Cloud drives innovation because it offers unlimited resources at the click of a button, enabling businesses to shift with the fast-changing economy and competitive landscape. On the flip side, privately owned data centers offer predictable costs for established activities with stabilized needs. Without an understanding of the type of workload, its typical resource consumption, and the costs associated with that usage, making placement decisions amounts to an educated guess.
Bringing ITAM and FinOps practices together is a necessary step to provide leadership with the information they need to move beyond guesswork and into data-driven decision-making. This partnership between the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum will foster the development of new approaches for unifying data and best practices across cloud and private infrastructure and software.
FinOps and ITAM: Together with Flexera One
It all starts with data. Organizations need to bring all their hardware and software cost and usage data together in a uniform format to truly understand their business. Today, data scientists make an enormous effort to normalize data from different sources to help with business decision-making. These skills are expensive and hard to find.
Initiatives such as the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS ™) can help reduce this challenge. FOCUS prescribes a single format for all cloud providers and software vendors to produce their cost and usage billing data in, so businesses do not have to spend the time and effort to normalize it after ingestion. In the future, the FOCUS specification may grow to include columns for private cloud and data center cost and usage, but today, the spec is only for public cloud infrastructure and SaaS.
Flexera One offers a solution that is not currently available anywhere else. Our portfolio for managing hybrid usage and cost is underpinned by a common data layer called the Technology Intelligence Platform that does the work of unifying and normalizing all your data. Flexera One bridges the gap between ITAM and FinOps data so businesses can answer critical questions around resource planning, software licensing and optimization.
Want to learn more about how Flexera One can help you make more informed decisions with complete technology visibility? Please check out our resources, or connect with us today.
