Back to work after a wonderful week in Barcelona and an inspiring experience at the FinOpsX conference!
A special thanks to the FinOps Foundation team and Europe lead Ruben Vander Stockt for organizing such an exceptional event – from the incredible lineup of speakers to the flawless coordination, stunning location, and great food and drinks.
After attending two keynote sessions, plenty of insightful studio room sessions, and countless conversations with FinOps enthusiasts and vendors in the world of FinOps, I am happy to share my key takeaways:
✅ **Data & FOCUS: The Foundation of FinOps Success **
Getting the data right is the cornerstone of FinOps. There were plenty of use cases where FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) enabled teams, vendors, and organizations to standardize and accelerate collaboration, ultimately delivering invaluable business insights.
My favorite quote was by Kumar YB from The HEINEKEN Company:
"People love putting their emotions into their spreadsheets."
My life got a little bit better by having this quote in it😁!
✅ **Expanding the Scope**
While cloud is the core use case of FinOps, there’s a clear trend toward applying its principles beyond the cloud: SaaS, on-premise datacenters, licensing, just to name a few. The ecosystem is clearly growing, but with it also the complexity of integrating new vendors, personas, and use cases.
With data as the backbone, FOCUS will need to adapt to support this broader scope. It’ll be exciting to watch how this evolves over time.
✅ **Sustainability: My Personal Favorite**
Sessions I enjoyed the most came from Vik S. at Mastercard, Ferran Grau Horta at Adevinta Spain and Dany Daya at Etsy, showcasing their efforts to calculate carbon footprint for cloud usage and datacenters. Both showed their successes, but also clearly articulated the struggles with a lack of standards, granularity, transparency and availability (3 months delay?) in sustainability reporting.
We would need transparent and detailed data from vendors and sustainability standards embedded into frameworks like FOCUS. A special shoutout to James Hall from Greenpixie for demonstrating how relevant data can be integrated into cloud cost data – something I look forward to start working with!
✅**AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI**
It wasn’t an AI conference, but what is a conference without AI these days? I was thrilled to see fellow Belgians (Jan Peeters and Benjamin van der Maas) from Johnson & Johnson on the final day presenting their impressive use case in front of a large audience, showcasing how they leveraged generative AI to scale anomaly detection in their FinOps processes.
As generative AI continues to advance, I expect we’ll see much more innovation in how AI supports FinOps – and vice versa – in the near future.
Exciting times ahead for the FinOps community! A huge thank you again to the organizers for such an incredible experience!
See you all in San Diego? 😊