For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley is joined by four distinguished guests from the FinOps Foundation following the recent FinOps X conference in San Diego. Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, Graham Murphy, and the TCP team dive deep into the evolution of FinOps from pure cloud cost management to the broader “Cloud Plus” world, the rapid adoption of Focus 1.2, and how AI is transforming both what we manage and how we manage it.

Rob Martin has been with the FinOps Foundation for four years, currently focusing on the AI working group, ITAM initiatives, and the rapidly growing public sector adoption. His experience spans training development and strategic initiatives that have helped shape the foundation’s direction during a period of explosive growth.

Mike Fuller is one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation and co-author of the Cloud FinOps book. As a member of the Focus project steering committee, he’s been instrumental in developing the specification that’s standardizing cloud billing data across the industry.

Graham Murphy serves as Director of SaaS P&L for Technology One in Brisbane. With 8-9 years in FinOps and recently nominated as both a FinOps Ambassador and Focus Ambassador, Graham brings a practitioner’s perspective from the APAC region and insights on implementing Focus in a SaaS environment.

The 2025 FinOps X conference in San Diego marked a significant milestone with approximately 2,000 attendees—a substantial increase from the previous year. Despite the larger venue, the conference maintained its intimate feel, allowing for meaningful connections and knowledge sharing.

2:49 Graham: “AI definitely grew a lot this year. A lot more talk about how you go about managing AI, how FinOps is going to drive better value out of your AI investments. And also just a lot of people trying to understand where to start.”

The conference format evolved with more senior leadership participation, including executives from PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, and Nubank sharing their FinOps journeys. The quality of presentations notably improved, with practitioners willing to share deeper insights into their mature FinOps programs.

A dominant theme throughout the conference was the expansion beyond traditional cloud cost management into what the foundation calls “Cloud Plus”—encompassing SaaS, data center, licensing, and AI costs.

4:31 Mike: “We saw that sort of echoed quite well across many of the breakout sessions by practitioners exactly how they’re sort of incorporating other costs into the conversation of their practices.”

6:56 Rob: “Ticketmaster said something that I loved, which was that they were ‘happily hybrid’… we understand that we’ve got all these different modalities that we’re going to use to deliver value—SaaS models and data center models and cloud models.”

This shift represents a fundamental change in how organizations view FinOps, moving from a cloud-specific practice to a comprehensive IT financial management approach.

The release of Focus 1.2 at the conference marked a pivotal moment for billing data standardization. The specification now includes support for SaaS costs and virtual currencies like tokens and credits—critical for AI and modern consumption-based pricing models.

16:23 Mike: “The big tagline for Focus 1.2 was sort of keeping up with how FinOps is approaching that Cloud Plus world with the introduction of columns that really help bring in SaaS costs.”

The adoption curve for Focus has been remarkable:

19:53 Rob: “Last year, people were saying ‘Tell me what is Focus?’ In Barcelona, they asked ‘How do I actually start using it?’ This year, almost every conversation was ‘I’m trying to get my data into Focus, and this is how we’re doing it.'”

Major milestones include:

The transformation in AI cost management over the past year has been dramatic. Organizations have moved from wondering if they should worry about AI costs to actively managing significant AI spending.

13:31 Rob: “We’ve got private connections to some customers where we’re serializing 400 gigabits per second line rate to them, so that they can very, very rapidly move libraries of data to tightly schedule back to back with perhaps maybe a GPU farm instance.”

Organizations face two distinct AI-related challenges:

25:42 Graham: “We did a top down view, and we did a bottom up view… What was interesting is we intersected almost perfectly across the middle in what we had forecast the spend/cost profile might look like.”

Despite the growth and sophistication of tools and practices, the community continues to acknowledge that “there are no runners” in FinOps maturity.

8:10 Graham: “There is still quite a lot of people in that crawl/walk phase… As the keynotes alluded to as well, there are no runners. And it still seems to be quite true.”

This reflects the rapidly evolving nature of cloud technology, pricing models, and the continuous expansion of FinOps scope into new areas.

The conference revealed a trend toward specialization within FinOps practices:

32:51 Justin: “I think you’re going to see people who get kind of more into specialized areas of the FinOps frameworks… I’m really big on the data part of it. I’m really big about the strategic application of that data into my business.”

This specialization is reflected in the new framework’s “scopes” concept, allowing practitioners to focus on specific technology areas or cost domains while maintaining alignment with overall business strategy.

A significant shift in FinOps messaging emerged at the conference—moving from cost-focused discussions to value and efficiency conversations.

35:50 Graham: “If you keep going to your engineers and say, ‘Hey, listen, your costs are out of control’… that will start to get people offside. But if you can start to talk to them about efficiency and scaling quicker and providing better value to the customer, that’s much more valuable.”

38:53 Graham: “Managing exchange rate fluctuations and how vendors can hit you in your underlying costs… That’s our next challenge for the next 12 months.”

41:12 Mike: “There’s a pocket of the community that really has a high desire for sustainability… there’s a lot of organizations that aren’t prioritizing the sustainability conversation in the FinOps space yet.”

43:42 Rob: “Most people who were reporting on data center costs… were really focusing on understanding usage and cost… But they weren’t really optimizing a lot in those areas yet.”

The keynote featuring Nubank’s journey from zero to 100+ million customers in five years demonstrated the framework’s scalability and adaptability under extreme growth conditions.

For perhaps the only conference where it happens, all four major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and presumably Oracle) appeared on stage together during day one—a testament to FinOps’ unique position in the industry.

The intimate chalk talk format proved particularly valuable, with practitioners engaging in deep, interactive discussions about specific challenges and solutions.

On Framework Evolution: “It’s not just cost management anymore… My drivers are very much around the value and efficiency side of things.”

On AI Impact: “The way that this customer cohort has changed over the last two years is nothing short of astonishing.”

On Focus Adoption: “The word is out and the excitement is out about it, and now we’re down to the implementation details.”

On Public Sector Leadership: “This is one of the areas where public sector is really, I think, in many ways, advanced over private sector organizations.”

On Practitioner Challenges: “There’s never been enough time to do all the FinOps you want. But now there’s going to be even more as it starts to expand into Cloud Plus.”

Save the Date: June 8-11, 2026 in San Diego Rob emphasizes this is “called family planning for a reason”—book your calendars now!

FinOps X 2025 demonstrated that the practice has definitively moved beyond its cloud cost management origins. With Focus 1.2 providing the standardization backbone, government adoption driving private sector compliance, and AI creating both challenges and opportunities, FinOps practitioners are positioned at the center of IT financial transformation.

The expansion into “Cloud Plus” reflects the reality that modern IT environments are hybrid by default, requiring holistic approaches to cost management across cloud, SaaS, data center, and emerging technologies. As organizations mature in their cloud journey, FinOps evolves from a cost-control function to a strategic enabler of business value through technology efficiency.

The message is clear: FinOps is no longer just about managing cloud costs—it’s about optimizing the entire technology investment portfolio to drive business outcomes.

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Thanks to Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, and Graham Murphy for joining us, and thank you for listening to TCP Talks!