The 4th annual FinOps X, the FinOps Foundation’s annual practitioner conference, took place in San Diego in June 2025 and proudly announced more attendees and sponsors than ever before. It’s an indication that FinOps is now the de facto practice for cloud cost management.
In the Day 1 keynote, J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, shared the remarkable growth of the community and the evolution of the FinOps practice. He highlighted the release of version 1.2 of the FOCUS™ specification, and how FinOps has expanded beyond the public cloud to include new scopes of technology spending, including SaaS, cloud licensing, AI and data center costs.
J.R. Storment shares the remarkable growth of the FinOps community and evolution of this practice to new scopes of technology spending.
FinOps and ITAM on common ground
Marking the expansion of scopes was the announcement of a new partnership between the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum. The partnership aims to bring FinOps practitioners and ITAM professionals together through events, working groups, and social networks to establish best practices for accomplishing their shared goal: driving business value through investments in technology resources and services.
Flexera was a Platinum sponsor at this year’s event, and we showcased how Flexera One is uniquely positioned to help organizations bring FinOps and ITAM practices together for a complete picture of technology usage and cost.
Rich Gibbons from Synyega, a Flexera customer and ITAM expert, sat down with Flexera’s Jeremy Chaplin to talk about the synergies between ITAM and FinOps in their session called Shared Goals, Shared Gains: Why ITAM and FinOps Belong Together. They noted collaboration will be the key to success, as neither of these two teams have time to learn each other’s unique disciplines. There will be “no body count” as ITAM and FinOps converge; there’s a need for both.
Rich Gibbons (Synyega) and Jeremy Chaplin (Flexera) discuss the benefits of collaboration between FinOps and ITAM professionals.
FinOps for AI
The Day 2 keynote was all about AI – both AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI. Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation, reminded attendees that FinOps for AI is…well, just FinOps. The same principles and capabilities that apply to cloud spend also apply to spending on resources that build AI and services that deliver it.
Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation, discusses FinOps for AI in the Day 2 keynote.
Flexera’s customers, Kimberly Floss (PepsiCo) and Lisa Gerger (Northrop Grumman), hosted the breakout session called AI Dreams Big: FinOps Keeps the Receipts. They discussed how AI spend is just cloud spend, and the same FinOps principles should apply. Their secret to success? Trust. They shared how strong engineering relationships enabled proactive, cost-aware AI planning – not just cleanup.
Kimberly Floss (PepsiCo) and Lisa Gerger (Northrop Grumman) talked about how AI spend is just cloud spend, and the same FinOps principles apply.
Kimberly also shared her story on the main stage during the Day 2 keynote. She stressed the importance for FinOps teams to develop trust with engineering teams in the decentralized cloud model. Without trust, DevOps will focus on workload performance and FinOps teams will be left wondering why their cost optimization recommendations aren’t being acted on.
PepsiCo’s Kimberly Floss, a Flexera customer, spoke in the Day 2 keynote about the importance of collaboration between FinOps and engineering.
Cody McDaniels from Barracuda, another Flexera customer, echoed the importance of trust between FinOps and engineering teams. In his breakout session titled Navigating the FinOps Waters: Take a Swim through Barracuda’s FinOps Journey, he spoke about how building trust with engineers—by addressing their concerns, not just cutting costs—was the foundation for getting FinOps embedded across teams.
AI for FinOps
Flexera’s solution – a FinOps Certified platform – provides all the critical capabilities to help customers like Rich, Kimberly, Lisa, and Cody manage AI spending alongside other technology costs. But Flexera is also propelling customers into the future of FinOps with AI for FinOps, where Flexera delivers next generation capabilities to make practicing FinOps easier. Features like predictive forecasting and AI-powered anomaly detection make budget planning more accurate and help businesses adhere to those budgets.
Stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper: FinOps for AI and AI for FinOps: A Guide for FinOps Practitioners.
Cloud sustainability
Cloud sustainability efforts are tightly aligned with FinOps, as reduction of excess compute usage reduces both unnecessary costs and unnecessary consumption of carbon, water and electricity.
Mark Bradley (Flexera), J.R. Storment (FinOps Foundation), John Ridd and James Hall (Greenpixie) celebrate the alignment of FinOps and cloud sustainability.
Flexera recently announced a new partnership with Greenpixie that brings Greenpixie’s ISO-certified data for carbon, water and electricity consumption into Flexera’s Cloud Cost Optimization offering. This approach aligns carbon savings to cost metrics at the resource level, where changes need to be made. With this data, FinOps teams can make recommendations and deliver reports that show resource optimization implications for both cost and carbon. See Mark’s and James’ talk at FinOps X about the new cloud sustainability capabilities in Flexera One.
Connect with the Flexera team
The Flexera team showcased our platform’s unique ability to bring FinOps and ITAM data together to help businesses maximize the value of all their IT investments.
FinOps X flew by—didn’t catch us? No worries! Grab some time with us now to learn more about the Flexera One solution for FinOps and ITAM.
