FinOps Foundation Quickly Gains Industry-Wide Support to Advance Cloud Financial Management and Education

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education and standards. The Linux Foundation announced an intent to form the FinOps Foundation at Open Source Summit North America in late June. Today it's announcing formation and support from founding members Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, CloudWize, Contino, Kubecost, Neos, Opsani, ProsperOps, Timspirit and VMware.

The newly formed Technical Advisory Council welcomes representatives from Apptio, Google and VMware alongside existing practitioner member seats held by individuals from Atlassian, Nationwide and Pearson. The TAC's charter requires a combination of appointed and elected members and end-user practitioners who will be added in the coming months. The initial TAC members include:

• Eugene Khvostov, VP of Product & Engineering at Apptio
• Matt Leonard, Product Management lead for Google Compute Cloud billing
• John McLoughlin, Director of Product Management for CloudHealth by VMware
• Mike Fuller, Principal Systems Engineer for FinOps at Atlassian
• Joseph Daly, Director of Cloud Optimization at Nationwide
• Ashley Hromatko, Sr. Mgr FinOps at Pearson

"With demand for new collaboration to support cloud procurement between IT and finance teams, the FinOps community is growing fast," said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. "We have the infrastructure and governance in place to support this acceleration and provide best-in-class training and education opportunities to grow this discipline. Our founding members are making this possible with today's commitments, and we look forward to working with them in the years to come."

"We are thrilled to see the FinOps Foundation formalize their launch at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon where efficiency and cloud financial management is becoming a growing concern," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). "CNCF looks forward to collaborating with the FinOps Foundation to improve cloud financial management for all."

Also launching today is the formalization of the FinOps Certified Platform, FinOps Service Certified Service Provider and Training Partner programs.

FinOps Certified Platform (FCP) is a pre-qualified tier of vetted technology providers who offer software solutions to successfully adopt cloud financial management practices. Launch partners include Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth by VMware, CloudWize, Kubecost, Opsani and ProsperOps.

FinOps Certified Service Provider (FCSP) is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers who have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt cloud financial management practices. The FCSP partners offer FinOps support, consulting, professional services and training for organizations embarking on their cloud financial management journey. Launch partners include Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, Contino, Neos and Timspirit. 

FinOps Foundation recognizes a select group of FinOps Training Partners (FTP). This is a tier of vetted training providers who have deep experience in cloud financial management training. Launch partners include Apptio, Cloudeasier, Contino and VMware.

Training opportunities for members include the free edX course, Introduction to FinOps, launched by Linux Foundation and FinOps Foundation just this summer. The course is open for enrollment now. The FinOps Foundation also offers the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP). The FinOps landscape is depicted here: https://landscape.finops.org

The FinOps Foundation includes nearly 2000 individual practitioner members across the globe, representing more than 1200 companies. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills and technical processes.

FinOps is the operating model for the cloud, which is resulting in a shift that combines systems, best practices, and culture to increase an organization's ability to understand cloud costs and make informed business decisions. FinOps ensures that companies get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud. It pushes accountability for spending to the edge where developers control purchasing decisions and provides a new set of centralized processes to maximize efficiency of purchases and the ability to allocate spending to teams.

For more information about the FinOps Foundation, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

Founding Member Quotes

Apptio
"Managing cloud costs and usage continues to be a top concern as cloud spending accelerates even faster than forecasted as a result of the business disruption, we've experienced this year. It's been incredible to watch the FinOps Foundation grow from Cloudability's Quarterly Customer Advisory Board meetings to a robust community dedicated to helping the industry manage cloud costs more effectively. We look forward to continuing our support of the Foundation's efforts to standardize best practices and education for cloud financial management," said Eugene Khvostov, VP of Product & Engineering at Apptio.

Cloudeasier
"Over recent years, most companies have experienced opening the 'Pandora's Box' of the Public Cloud. The ease of consumption and availability of innovative services have been opposed by the necessity to understand, forecast, and report on the IT costs of every project. FinOps aims to solve this equation with the setup of processes, teams, and tools, which will make companies take full advantage of all Public Cloud benefits. As a FinOps pure player, it was an obvious choice for Cloudeasier to be part of the FinOps Foundation adventure. We are thrilled to participate, contribute, and learn, together with the Foundation, to set the next industry standard for Cloud Finance Management," said Aymerc Thas-Pinot, CEO Cloudeasier.

Cloudsoft
"Cloudsoft is proud to be a member of the FinOps Foundation and we are excited to be part of the growing community focused on developing and sharing best practices in Cloud Financial Management. Our customers need to innovate without exploding costs. Therefore, the best practices established within the FinOps Foundation are crucial to gaining optimum business value from the cloud," said Aled Sage, Head of FinOps at Cloudsoft.

CloudWize
"We see FinOps need in cloud cost-control, and optimization is on the rise. As a member of the FinOps Foundation, CloudWize provides a seamless solution that helps FinOps write policies to monitor and alert on undesired situations and prevent cost overhead. With CloudWize, FinOps analysts can query and search for misconfigurations and abnormal metrics that impact costs, without writing a single line of code," said Yotam Atad, CEO of CloudWize.

Contino
"Contino is delighted to become a member of the FinOps Foundation. As organizations start to become more mature with their cloud adoption programs, many are recognizing the importance of adopting FinOps practices and Financial Agility as an integral part of their strategy. Working alongside the FinOps Foundation to create best practices, we will be able to better support our customers in creating modern Cloud Operating models by aligning their cloud adoption journey with spend-to-engineering efforts and business initiatives. We look forward to further sharing our experiences, whilst upskilling the community and our clients," said Ben Saunders VP of Strategy & Consulting, Contino.

Kubecost
"As more teams adopt Kubernetes and next generation cloud native technologies at scale, we are excited to be part of the community that is thinking deeply about how to help teams manage spend in these new environments. We look forward to developing more open source solutions to help benefit this growing community!" said Webb Brown, Kubecost co-founder.

Neos
"We are adamant in taking steps towards a positive change in Cloud financial management," says Neos CEO Davorin Capan. "FinOps offers us necessary practices that facilitate our transition towards a truly 'cloud-first' strategy, bringing together technology, business and finance. Understanding the significance of this movement, we already have half a dozen of certified of FinOps practitioners in our team. Moreover, we are developing CloudVane, Multicloud Cost Management solution built on basic FinOps principles. We aim to include FinOps methodology into every consulting project, particularly in the form of turn-key solutions for our clients' cloud demands."

Opsani
"Optimizing cloud expenditures and managing workloads to be at their utmost efficiency is a paramount business concern as more businesses are shifting their traditional IT models to the cloud and implementing SaaS business lines. The FinOps Foundation is providing the essential service of highlighting best practices for managing cloud costs across the enterprise for better financial and computation results," said Ross Schibler, CEO and Founder of Opsani, a leading Silicon Valley startup.

ProsperOps
"Cloud success cannot be achieved without Cloud Financial Management success and the FinOps Foundation is leading the way for every business to master this critical discipline. We're thrilled to be a FinOps Certified Platform founding member and offer our service to practitioners looking to fully automate industry-leading savings outcomes," said Chris Cochran, CEO of ProsperOps.

Timspirit
"For many years, Timspirit has been helping its customers understand, control and optimize their costs in an on-demand environment without any proven standards. We have also seen the emergence of the Cloud and FinOps, not only as an obvious source of savings, but also as an essential lever in reducing the carbon footprint of IT by sharing resources and improving efficiency. Timspirit is convinced that FinOps will become the ubiquitous discipline leading to a controlled, economical and sustainable IT. As a member of the FinOps Foundation, Timspirit is proud to work with our peers to offer our clients a shared FinOps framework based on market best practices."

VMware
"Cloud financial management has never been more critical than it is right now. Organizations around the world are accelerating their cloud strategies while at the same time trying to control costs in a turbulent economic environment. The FinOps Foundation is doing important work to advance cloud financial management practices and practitioners. We're excited to learn from FinOps Foundation members and contribute best practices we've gathered through our partnership with thousands of organizations worldwide," said Joe Kinsella, vice president and CTO, CloudHealth by VMware.

About the FinOps Foundation
The FinOps Foundation (F2) is a nonprofit trade association made up of FinOps practitioners around the world. Grounded in real world stories, expertise and inspiration for and by FinOps practitioners, the F2 is focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards to help community members and their teams become better at cloud financial management. For more information or to join, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

CONTACT: [email protected] 

SOURCE The Linux Foundation

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