Coffee with CloudBolt | Focus on FinOps: The Alignment Paradox

William Norton: Yep, thanks everybody for joining

William Norton: couple of housekeeping notes before we kick off.

William Norton: I just wanna make sure everybody knows we are recording this webinar. So if you don’t have a chance to fit all the way through. If you want to come back to it, we’ll make a recorded version available via email to everybody who has registered and who jumped on feel free to share and comment this out. If you don’t have us on social. We’ll be sharing that out via email as well our Linkedin, where you can keep up with all kind of future events and and webinars that we will have on the calendar

William Norton: with that. Let’s jump in.

William Norton: Everyone who works in this industry knows that it’s here. It’s here to stay.

William Norton: Finops is not going away.

William Norton: And that’s because the cloud cost problem is not going away

William Norton: from our own research. The cloud industry insights. We know that 82% of companies now have a formal finops practice within their company.

William Norton: but they’re still struggling. It’s still hard.

William Norton: If it was easy. We wouldn’t be talking about this.

William Norton: So, as we analyse the market, talk to our customers and engaged our partners.

William Norton: We realized that the market had gone to a cloud first, st which was, How do I deploy, cloud to get cost savings. How do I deploy Cloud to get additional agility? Or how do I deploy Cloud? Because, frankly, it was a company mandate?

William Norton: But what it meant was, cloud was not necessarily deployed in a way that was best optimized to serve the company’s outcomes and business requirements. At 1st it was save money at all costs. Now it’s

William Norton: prove to me that this new service is going to actually show value to the business. Gone are the days where you can say this is bigger, better, faster. So I’m going to go and move everything over here. A lot of our.

William Norton: Our customer stakeholders are extremely challenged with

William Norton: finding the value

William Norton: that investment truly entailed for the business, right so to be able to

William Norton: portray that roi back to the executives and the boards for them is is extremely important.

William Norton: We’ve seen so much in the press over the last year or 2 about reducing cloud costs, optimizing, reducing cloud spend.

William Norton: But it’s been recently where we started to see the conversation start to shift towards. There’s got to be something more. There’s got to be something around maximizing cloud value, and when you play that out to its logical destination

William Norton: it lands at Cloud Roi.

William Norton: Alright. Well, thanks to everybody for joining today’s.

William Norton: we have a panel of speakers today, and I definitely want to thank everybody for jumping on. So Paul is a senior partner at Wakefield research and brings more than a decade of research experience with cutting edge global brand from Microsoft to Sprint Samsung and Nintendo and Paul is our partner in crime when it comes to industry research.

William Norton: We use Wakefield research for a lot of our public industry, insight reports. And so a lot of what we’ve done in the last year or so has been with Wakefield, and he brings kind of the the analysis perspective to everything that we’re talking about today.

William Norton: For those who have not met our chief technology and product officer at Bubble. That is Mr. Kyle Campos, and he leads the development of of kind of our next generation augmented finops capabilities before joining bubble. He was the executive Vice President of Technology at Smart, where he led the Enterprise engineering and finops team. So a lot of background in this space he is also a board member of the Finops Foundation.

William Norton: and then finally to Yasmin from Storeforge, who leads up their product team as head of product. Stormforge, is the strategic technology partner of Bubble that offers automated Kubernetes resource management using AI and Ml to continuously right guys workloads.

William Norton: This is our panel. My name is Will Norton. I oversee product marketing for Cloudvolt, and I will be kind of running Mc. Today.

William Norton: So let’s

William Norton: put some context here for those of you who are unaware of

William Norton: the kind of methodology and contact, as well as if you’re new to public industry, insights

William Norton: a bit of a primer there. So public industry, insights is our market research, and really our goal. With all things, Pii is to offer kind of an objective examination of prevalent trend in the market.

William Norton: And and opportunities in the market, and really help all of us who kind of exist in these spaces separate

William Norton: the reality from hype and discord, that oftentimes can kind of muddy the waters, and so, taking more of of a of a research angle and asking kind of key questions that we feel are not being asked in the market of of business leaders and executives.

William Norton: In doing so, you know, we we like to share that out with with larger audiences. So business leaders, such as those of you who are on the call are more informed and can make better decisions in your organization. As we talk about today. You know our our. This would be the second in a series of finops, related bubble industry insights.

William Norton: both of which we’ve worked with Wakefield on.

William Norton: and Paul gonna walk through the methodology of this one because we took a different approach of who we reached out to and where we did that. So Paul.

Paul Bragan: So for this research Wakefield fielded the survey questions to 900 respondents in total across 3 key audiences. So 300 300 of our respondents were were finops, professionals so essentially finops, practitioners.

Paul Bragan: We also surveyed 300 engineers and developers who work across cloud engineering and devops and cloud architecture platform, engineering, etc. And then we also surveyed 300 executives and business leaders. So these are the Ctos, the Cios the Svps that are managing cloud decision making at their organization.

Paul Bragan: We surveyed a mix of businesses across the country. We did that so we could get a broad. Read on perspectives. There’s there’s 2 specific elements of this research that I think are worth calling attention to that make this survey design really distinct. One is.

Paul Bragan: we have a large survey sample so that we can look at each of those 3 audiences with statistical significance. So, in short, this is this is a robust decision grade survey sample.

Paul Bragan: The second element is that we didn’t want to explore Finops purely from the perspective of finops. It it can create a little bit of an echo chamber. And so we wanted to understand how finops, professionals, how engineers, how the C-suite, how they’re viewing Finops! Are they seeing the same picture that way we can look and see like, where is their alignment? And where’s their potential disagreement?

William Norton: Thanks, Paul. So I want to give a bit of a backdrop and and talk about

William Norton: the thesis going into this this research. And really what? What led us to create this piece?

William Norton: For those of you who read it. We’ll go through some of the

William Norton: findings from our last finops report. We did have a baseline

William Norton: in in 2023 of a lot of of kind of insights, and I’ll go through the high level of that. But the backdrop coming out of that research, and what we found in 2023 is is just a continued momentum in the world of been on.

William Norton: I think at this point, if if you know, we can confidently say most businesses have an established den off practice within their corporate structure, and the impact of that team.

William Norton: Now we see 4 to 5 people on average, that make up that team continues to advance out

William Norton: from kind of its early origins.

William Norton: And so, as Paul had mentioned, you know, we we talked to Finoff leaders and practitioners.

William Norton: obviously to get their perspective. But then, going to the other personas that we know are critical to making

William Norton: finops.

William Norton: you know, useful and and beneficial in a business

William Norton: having to work with the Devops, teams and the cloud engineering teams that actually have hands on keyboards for the public and private cloud, as well as the it executives who obviously have to steer, enable and support the cultural changes needed, for

William Norton: you know, if they’re not be effective.

William Norton: And our goal was to ask the same question of all of these persona groups to look at the variation, and to see if there’s any perceptible differences among these different stakeholder groups

William Norton: going into the.

William Norton: We knew there was strong industry, adoption, and business alignment.

William Norton: We knew that synops is considered very fast moving. It is growing significantly year on year, but it is still very much maturing domain.

William Norton: and we also knew through things like the data. Finops report that the Finop Foundation does every year that there is a a heavy emphasis on automation in the community to try to scale out using technology, these, the effects and the results of finops teams.

William Norton: And so with this, the the kind of the big question that we went into this research with was what gaps exist between current and up

William Norton: team. And what do they need to achieve? Continuous roi in the cloud.

William Norton: Now, another piece of this backdrop was that we had done a 2023 Vii report.

William Norton: And you know, we we kind of submitted in that research that while that presents a very promising narrative

William Norton: there, there is a lot of accountability and and new layers of technical capability that need to be revisited for Finops to actually break through and overcome what consistently seems to be a trend of rising cloud cost.

William Norton: Some of the big data points that we saw is that 82% of companies, as of 2,023 had that formalized and not practiced.

William Norton: I think we, you know, looking at that now, it’s probably much higher. At this point.

William Norton: The average team size was about 4.1 and growing.

William Norton: We saw that 9% of respondents believe that finops is the responsibility of everyone involved in the cloud, which kind of flies in the face of what you would consider the community to be saying so. I think anybody who has existed in in Finops for some time knows that there has to be kind of cultural change where everybody who works in the cloud has a responsibility

William Norton: of of making sure that there’s financial management and and good cost decisions. And so we saw that being very low, and and that was one of those things that kind of struck us as as being potential issue

William Norton: of of kind, of cultural change that needed to happen. And and then, probably most starkly. We heard from a lot of the respondents in that survey that

William Norton: While there was a lot of excitement around, finops.

William Norton: most were were kind of hedging that it was going to take 2 to 3 years to get a positive outcome for their finops program that they had stood up.

William Norton: And so it’s with that context that you know, some of our recommendations coming out of that survey were largely around. How do you kind of create cultural change within the business and adoption within the business. Because there’s excitement from leadership. There’s there’s growing investment in finops

William Norton: but ultimately it does feel like the the rest of the organization have yet to kind of catch on

William Norton: to fin Ops, and really be

William Norton: very confident in in what would be kind of a a

William Norton: a long term pattern in the business.

William Norton: So I’ll pause there, and and I’ll let Kyle, if you have any other kind of observations that led into this study that we’re going to talk about next.

Kyle Campos: Yeah, no, I think I I think that report came at an interesting time with like community momentum. And what sort of trailing indicators or business impact had been felt at at that time.

Kyle Campos: And it was clear the business impact hadn’t yet been felt yet, right? And I think there was

Kyle Campos: a lot a lot more uncertainty about the path ahead.

Kyle Campos: I think you use the word hedging on on the forward looking impact as well, like, okay, well.

Kyle Campos: we got some. We got some things brewing here in the community in this practice, and we have some thesis around. It’s its business impact. But there wasn’t a lot of

Kyle Campos: evidence yet of it, of it bearing fruit that that I think for some

Kyle Campos: myself included, who had, you know, are already been in it in it. You know, some years leading into that. I was pretty shocked by that like, really, you’re not like.

Kyle Campos: The impact seemed pretty clear from my perspective of being like in the, you know, in the sort of finop salt mines, I guess. With you know with with my organization.

Kyle Campos: But at the same time that that Finops X at that time you could. It was a big jump forward from the previous previous year, right in just sort of community engagement, and the conversation was starting to evolve

Kyle Campos: and mature.

Kyle Campos: so I think you know teaser for the next one. You can kind of see how this, how this moved year to year.

William Norton: Exactly right. And that’s why we thought it was so important to kind of give this this groundwork in this context, because this was a report that was released in either. Late Q. 2 of last year, early Q. 3 of the calendar year, and so about a year difference between this report and what we’re going to go through here. And, boy what a year can do. So let’s let’s talk about some of the key. Finding that we

William Norton: received in in our latest Vii.

William Norton: So there were a lot of gains

William Norton: in in the

William Norton: in the world of finops, culturally, that we saw from this study.

William Norton: 70% of respondents claim that the effectiveness of building a culture of collaboration between Finops and and the devops. Slash engineering

William Norton: Teams was was was very high confidence, and that is something that has, I, I would say, plagued the Fin Ops community for such a long time. In fact, if you look back on kind of prior years in in the state of finop report.

William Norton: This kind of collaboration, and getting finops and devops seems to work arm in arm

William Norton: had been this challenge that the finox community had been looking to overcome for quite some time. So 70% was

William Norton: very good to see. In this report

William Norton: we saw that 65%

William Norton: across again, all cohort indicate that finops, objectives at this point are mostly or completely incorporated into cloud engineering teams and metrics and incentives. So that’s a big leap. Bringing the the goals and the frameworks and and the insight from

William Norton: in, you know, from spin off directly to the engineering teams and incorporating it into their processes and their their frameworks, is very important to seeing noticeable change

William Norton: happening kind of consistently throughout day to day in the cloud.

William Norton: 84% of respondents say that you know, finop considerations are always or often being built into the product engineering life, cycle and processes.

William Norton: I’ll be the 1st to admit this one surprised me. 85, you know, nearly 85% of respondents saying that.

William Norton: yeah, finops. Considerations are kind of now in in the mix with all the other considerations that happen

William Norton: with product development and and life cycle choices. That is a pretty big gain for for something that has been kind of on the back

William Norton: burner for a while.

William Norton: and then 88% claim that executive sponsorship and support in aligning finops and devops is very good or excellent. So the the higher layers of the business kind of making sure that this is important and that that’s well known. These are all very good signals to cultural change.

William Norton: That, I think, was was a long time kind of barrier to success for a lot of finops teams. You think about the ratio of you know what is 4.1 on average finops, leaders to oftentimes thousands

William Norton: of of engineers and devops leaders in a business.

William Norton: That ratio can really only be balanced if you have this kind of overall culture of finops in the business. And so, seeing these gains

William Norton: was great Paul. I’ll open it up to you to bring any insights from the data from your perspective, and then hand it to Kyle.

Paul Bragan: Yeah, so if we, there’s a lot here to be really happy about if we look at these numbers a little a little deeper. We look at them through the prism of those 3 audiences that we surveyed. You know. Naturally, there is the most confidence at the at the top of the org chart, where

Paul Bragan: maybe leaders aren’t as ball as involved in sort of the day to day operations. So executives are are actually the most likely they’re almost 40% more likely to say that efforts have been very effective. But across the board, you know, more than

Paul Bragan: over 80%. So more than 8 and 10. Whether we’re talking about practitioners or leaders, they feel that the efforts have been effective at, you know, at some level, whether somewhat effective, very effective, completely effective to build this culture of of collaboration.

Paul Bragan: So that’s a that’s a big accomplishment the

Paul Bragan: down below, where we see, you know, 88% claiming that executive support in aligning fin Ops and engineering, that it’s that it’s very good, or or that it’s excellent. To give you a sense for how strong that number is.

Paul Bragan: the the rest of respondents are essentially saying that it’s good across the board, you know, one port, 1% or or less, you know. Essentially 0. Statistically speaking, of of fin ops, professionals of engineers would say that it’s

Paul Bragan: fair or poor. So essentially, nobody is saying that people are saying that there is definitely support from executives. So like, I said, these are, these are really strong claims. These are these are numbers to be, really proud of.

William Norton: Kyle. I’ll open it up to you, I mean, I know, early on, and and obviously I’ve been in the the world of finance for quite some time. Getting that executive buy in seemed to be the largest challenge. Early on

William Norton: from an investment dollars perspective headcount, you know, just getting the rest of the organization to to steer in this direction.

William Norton: Pretty exciting to see 88%.

William Norton: What are your thoughts on that and the other things on on this slide?

Kyle Campos: Yeah, I

Kyle Campos: I was surprised. Cause I would say the you know, the sentiment

Kyle Campos: in the community, the chat, the chat in the summit in the virtual summits, and you know some of the state of phenomenal support data as well.

Kyle Campos: Shows a lot more tension here, or, you know, desire for improved exec executive support. So

Kyle Campos: this shows we have made a lot of progress there which is good.

Kyle Campos: Now,

Kyle Campos: Being an executive myself.

Kyle Campos: This is not. This is not something that stays forever. Executive support can be somewhat fickle if the if the outcomes don’t closely follow behind, right? So it’s it’s, you know, over one hurdle, and then staring, staring at the next. I think a little bit here, which it’s it’s a good thing from community momentum. And and you know the

Kyle Campos: the theoretical business impact. You need to clear that hurdle like, all right. Now you got the sponsorship. Now you got the support. Go, do.

Kyle Campos: and give me the promises that you’ve been you’ve been you know, talking about. So it’s it’s congratulations in one breath, and then like onto the next challenge in another. I think.

William Norton: I think some of the the next slide kind of points to

William Norton: maybe what you’re alluding to, and what we we see in here in the community is, you know, all of that last slide is really

William Norton: exciting to read and and digest when we 1st got the results back. But where we were scratching our head of it. And and this is.

William Norton: you know, really, some of the reason is we we kind of name this, that alignment paradox.

William Norton: At the same time that clearly there’s there’s cultural growth and movement maturity. There’s also

William Norton: a lot of of the cohort

William Norton: kind of saying blatantly that the divide between finops, teams and cloud engineer and engineering teams still exists. 86% that there’s still a divide between team

William Norton: and then 74% agree that the divide is is widening. So in the last 12 months

William Norton: that gap is growing

William Norton: between those 2 teams.

William Norton: the divide is is very much felt more by finop professionals. So 42% of finop professionals

William Norton: the viewing finops as a separate entity as a top challenge that they face. So so again getting the rest of the organization to kind of adopt that mindset of finops is the the role of everyone in the business, the steward of of it?

William Norton: And then, you see engineering

William Norton: reporting back that you know, they they only believe about 32% believe that same thing. So this paradox that we see where there’s obviously some some cultural barriers that have and hurdles that have been jumped over in the last, you know, one to 2 years. But then still, this kind of growing divide between engineering and finops teams.

William Norton: We’ll talk about.

William Norton: you know, some of some of the the challenges that Finops leaders face to try to get over these hurdles in a moment.

William Norton: But

William Norton: this was one that definitely made us scratch our heads. And so, Paul, is there anything that you’d like to talk about in the data set here.

Paul Bragan: Yeah, I think this slide is a good it’s a good snapshot of

Paul Bragan: where the rubber hits the road, or maybe you know, the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk, so to speak. So there’s a lot there’s disalignment, and there’s disagreement on the details and sort of what that divide is.

Paul Bragan: why it exists. And where do we go from here but that 80, that 86%. The fact that there is a divide. The fact that there’s an issue.

Paul Bragan: large companies and smaller organizations equally agree that there’s this divide. In fact, the numbers are nearly identical. You know, there’s a divide between Finops and the engineering engineering teams. Even the even the the C-suite, those that are managing the decision making. They see that divide and the that 86%. The fact that there’s an issue here.

Paul Bragan: That was one of the most consistent findings in the study, of course. Where do we go from? Here is where we see a lot of divergence.

Paul Bragan: And so it felt to us when we looked at these numbers that Finops has been prioritized, and they’ve they’ve been given a seat at the table. But maybe there’s still a question over whether they’re really being allowed to speak up. You know, when it comes to next steps, and and where do we go from? Here?

William Norton: How? What were your reactions when you 1st saw this.

Kyle Campos: Yeah, so clearly, like the previous slide was like, we are, the cultures made a large.

Kyle Campos: a large leap. And then this was like, well, clearly the work is not done here, because what this is

Kyle Campos: this is pushing back against is one of like the foundational principles of of

Kyle Campos: finops. And it’s and its influence from the devops principles. And 1 1 of those 3 is systems thinking and de siloing desiling yourselves. And what this is showing

Kyle Campos: is that everyone’s running to their specialization corners right?

Kyle Campos: and and in some cases viewing that positive, some some might view that positively here, saying, there’s not a problem with that.

Kyle Campos: Running, running, and and siloing yourself.

Kyle Campos: But the reality is, is that

Kyle Campos: You can’t possibly have

Kyle Campos: the business impact.

Kyle Campos: That is, that is promised by by doing that.

Kyle Campos: I I personally fought against this a lot when I started my finops team because it was there was a lot of sort of.

Kyle Campos: you know, business intuition that because there’s so many numbers and finances involved here that it should be something that’s taken outside of an engineering context.

Kyle Campos: And you know, handled entirely separately. And I think that’s kind of surfacing here.

Kyle Campos: That that’s a that’s a reflex. That’s an intuition that a lot have, and depending on how that function is running the fin Ops

Kyle Campos: function and practices is running

Kyle Campos: sort of you know how alien it feels to the engineering.

Kyle Campos: You know, language and process and mode of work, etc. It can keep separating that way right? And and you know, showing that the divide is even widening more

Kyle Campos: versus, you know, facilitating something that’s more common where there’s more, more and more overlap. That’s the direction we need to see in the Finops community. And as it’s, you know, being practiced in in businesses is that that’s actually becoming less and less specialized, more and more overlap collaboration and continuity between those 2 functions, and we’ll get into some of the

Kyle Campos: the how. You know, we think we can do that. But but clearly we got a lot of work to do there.

William Norton: Wanted to offer up, you know, Yasmin, maybe calling on you for a second, because, as we think about the user base of of Stormforge.

William Norton: I know you lean. You know that that product leans far more towards kind of engineering

William Norton: personas versus. You know some of the

William Norton: the world that we live in. You know more finops, leaders as buyers. What were we? What are your reactions to this? And and from the engineering perspective?

William Norton: Any any comments on on why this divide continues to grow.

Yasmin: This is definitely something we see, and

Yasmin: for for what we see from a like Kubernetes standpoint is teams just aren’t speaking the same language. It’s a lot of what you’re seeing in the report of. We’ll see Finops team saying like, Yes, cost is a top priority for us. We want to go in and optimize that they may have a level of reporting that they can go back to the teams and say, Hey, here are the areas that are the most challenging. We need to go address.

Yasmin: But from a platform engineer. Okay, great. You want me to go address this. But it it’s not that easy to just go in and make a change like if I make a change in one place, it’s gonna have ramifications across the application, and especially when it like my world obviously, is the Kubernetes world. There’s a lot more toggles for people to have to configure, so it’s

Yasmin: they can’t go back to the Finops team and say, like, No, this is actually really complicated. We can’t do it. And it’s getting them for us. It’s getting them on the same page, having them in the same meeting and having the software be the thing that drives the language versus the people, so that they can say, okay, I ran a report. I see the recommendations that I can go take action on. I will do that. And at the end of the day the Finops team sees the dollar value go down and they’re happy. And the platform engineers know that automation is handling this and not like someone going in and

Yasmin: making, one c, 2 z, changes.

William Norton: We see, you know, on this next slide. I just maybe build this out a little bit, but I think it speaks to, you know both of

William Norton: yes, and what you’re commenting on here, as well as what Kyle was commenting on is, you know, as we dug deeper into. Okay, why is there this divide?

William Norton: There’s some key questions and answers that I think at least point us in the right direction.

William Norton: and then we’ll layer on some of what we’re hearing from the community towards the end here. But you know there, there’s still no consensus on who should be responsible for fenops. Success.

William Norton: 63% of executives have the It department 53% of engineers of the It department

William Norton: 53% of finance professionals, said the finance department. So there’s a kind of pointing

William Norton: in a bunch of different directions to go. Well, the the buck stopped here or there, or or somewhere else.

William Norton: but this lack of alignment around.

William Norton: You know what?

William Norton: Who, who really ultimately should be in charge of the results of a finops team?

William Norton: It’s still something that’s very blurry even now, with, you know, a lot of mature companies having, you know, 2 to 3 years of a practice in place.

William Norton: Paul. Was there anything you wanted to comment on on this slide.

Paul Bragan: Just how deep this lack of consensus runs. So you’re looking here at sort of who people think is their 1st choice. And there really is a consensus here. There isn’t even consensus on who would be your second choice, you know, for example, like engineers, even as their second choice, they tend to say that the Dev team should be responsible for finop success rather than the finance team. We saw disagreement when we looked at

Paul Bragan: larger organizations versus smaller organizations. The the numbers were kind of all over the place, and it was really I like, I said, they’re they’re not even just disagreeing on who they who they pick, 1st who they pick. Second, there’s still disagreement. There’s really no alignment here.

Kyle Campos: Yeah.

William Norton: Internet.

Kyle Campos: Yeah. So

Kyle Campos: the the how closely this follows, like the devops cultural arc over time is, is pretty striking to me. When I saw this so

Kyle Campos: shared responsibility is like 3rd rail organizational thought, like, it is very difficult

Kyle Campos: to and very scary thought to walk up the executive chain like, well, it’s all of our responsibility. And like, okay, like, let’s back on planet Earth. Who is the throat that I am choking right like that? That is that is how the conversation devolves. And I think the the way through this, which is similar

Kyle Campos: exactly parallel to the to the devops. You know, cultural arc

Kyle Campos: is

Kyle Campos: moving from responsibility to outcome. To say, like, Okay, I know the shared responsibility is a difficult organizational thought for accountability, etc. purposes. But if we can align on the business outcome that this is going to drive the how becomes a little bit less important at at a at a top executive level

Kyle Campos: and seeing the impact is what is, what can align people on? So not a lot of people understood the impact of devops and continuous delivery and all those things and what it was going to do to your product velocity. It was like, Okay, there’s a lot of

Kyle Campos: lot of you know, complex language. But then the business impact started getting felt like, Oh, my, gosh, we’re getting time, our time to markets lowering right? And our our. You know, our, our lead time is actually making. Our customers are decreasing lead times when our customers happier. So that type of impact is where I think, is the next step of this conversation to to mature into.

William Norton: Is it fair to say that as you’re maturing your finance practice, this will change as well where where you begin responsibility, is maybe a little bit more centralized, and then, as you

William Norton: kind of get wins in your sale around finops as a practice, then it starts to kind of grow. You know, the responsibility starts to get felt in a broader sense.

Kyle Campos: I think a lot of that depends on how how it originated in, like where the seed was planted in the organization. To begin with.

Kyle Campos: In my context.

Kyle Campos: it’s always been the engineering side, because, you know, it was Cfos yelling at me about like

Kyle Campos: the the cost, the budget. And how are we going to forecast? And all of this before? Finops was really in a sort of, you know, emerging

Kyle Campos: title, and you know, practice in and of itself.

Kyle Campos: And so in those contexts, I think you you see this sort of

Kyle Campos: instrument instrumentation, the facilitation of how all of this comes together from insight to action.

Kyle Campos: I think you see that spread, you know, throughout the organization much more organically when it starts the other way. And you’re trying to inject

Kyle Campos: inject back into all those other parts of the business.

Kyle Campos: It takes it takes it takes more time, right? And you got more. Yasmin was talking about the you know language differences. You got a lot of things, a lot of a lot of

Kyle Campos: a lot of hurdles to to clear to to get it, you know, baked in to other parts of the org.

Paul Bragan: And yeah.

William Norton: And if I can, yeah, go ahead.

Yasmin: I was just gonna jump in on what Kyle said. What? Where we’ve seen this be most successful is with the rise of rise of a platform engineering teams. A lot of this capability becomes self service for other for folks in the organization. So even if they’re not thinking about it from a like this is my responsibility. The tooling is available to them. So it’s not extra effort to make sure that you are optimized from day one. It’s not extra effort to like.

Yasmin: Consider how this will impact your costs, because that tooling is available for you. And we’ve seen that be like when you talked about maturity like the more mature orgs

Yasmin: are thinking about this on day one, because it’s available to them, and it’s not oh, it’s not a lot more thinking and tooling that they have to put into place.

Yasmin: That maybe they would choose to not trade off like a developer is going to say I gotta get my app out as fast as possible. I’m not going to think about the cost ramifications, but if he doesn’t have to think about it on day one. Then it makes it a lot simpler.

William Norton: One other thing, Yasmin, that I know we’ve talked about in the past. That might be worth commenting on here, is there? There definitely does exist. Kind of silos of of strategy. Right? I mean, cost reduction in an organization.

William Norton: The pressure is felt everywhere. The pressure doesn’t always necessarily go through the fin OP. Team out every single time. And so, you know, I I’m sure it’s probably fair to say that in a lot of your engagements with customers

William Norton: you may be talking to an engineering or or dev team

William Norton: about. You know, storm Forge is a solution to to reduce cost

William Norton: kind of existing outside of a spin up priority or strategy, almost the silo that. Maybe the sales team isn’t even aware about. I mean, I know you’re talking about platform engineering

William Norton: that really can be beneficial in the way of kind of connecting the technology strategy. But and how often are finops leaders involved in the decision making. From your perspective.

Yasmin: In our world. Honestly, it’s a minority of the time that the Finops team is involved. Because those engineering teams are feeling the pressure. And it’s not even always the okay. I’m trying to reduce costs. It’s more about resources. It’s I know I’m wasting resources. And I would like to. If it’s, let’s say an on Prem Kubernetes deployment, I would like to free up those resources for other teams to be able to make use of them. If they’re on one of the cloud vendors, it’s

Yasmin: I can see the bill, and I’m trying to be more resource, aware, so that some the Cfo doesn’t knock on my door, so they’re trying to get ahead of that. And then also just making sure that workloads are properly right side from the other side of it. Of do I have enough resources? So they usually have that view, and as a result it ends up saving money, and we’ve had situations where the turn off team had no idea that the team was using Stormforge they’re optimizing their resources.

Yasmin: But when they were able to share a report that gets sent out through the organization. And then someone on the finance team sees it gets excited and they get pulled in. We can like, have that story. It’s a really nice win. But it almost.

Yasmin: It almost always happens after the fact than in the beginning. And it kind of points back to how siloed these teams are. Even if they’re the same goals, they’re not always talking to each other.

William Norton: Yeah.

William Norton: thank you for that.

William Norton: So I think as we

William Norton: we asked kind of another set of questions, and I’ll I’ll let Paul comment on on the exact methodology of this question. But you know, one of the things we wanted to do is go. Okay. So

William Norton: for the longest time. I think anybody who’s kind of been in the Finops role.

William Norton: whether it be, you know, leader or practitioner.

William Norton: You. There’s been this constant feeling of there’s a lot of different things I’m being asked to do. And if you you talk to, you know finite practitioner A, and then you go talk to finop practitioner B about their weekly schedule and their daily priorities. You hear a wide.

William Norton: that of variation.

William Norton: Between what? What finance leaders are all focusing on?

William Norton: And we asked the question, What’s what’s holding you back right now to bridge that divide, to get

William Norton: kind of better organizational adoption of fenops and what we found with kind of dark in in that there’s not one lever that

William Norton: this these cohorts agreed upon. It’s kind of

William Norton: all of the above, really. And so you see this becoming a problem of

William Norton: focusing on a whole bunch of different things and trying to overcome a whole bunch of different things

William Norton: as a small team.

William Norton: and that, you know, we continue to see the priorities of Finops

William Norton: teams kind of grow and change and and and get more complex as the clouds grow and become more complex, and as we learn more as a community

William Norton: but as you can see here, you know what what the responses were were pretty close. I mean, you don’t really have much variation.

William Norton: People are saying that there’s a skill set and knowledge gap. There is this issue of kind of viewing finops as a separate entity. You’ve got different reporting structures as as being a big problem. Cross functional collaboration is missing misaligned objectives and incentives, and then organizational silos.

William Norton: Paul, did you want to talk about this question and anything that was significant from your vantage point?

Paul Bragan: Sure. So the intent behind this question and the way it was asked was to try and get respondents to prioritize, so that we’d have certain things rise up to the top, and certain priorities

Paul Bragan: fall down to the bottom, and you can see it. It was really hard here. Everything kind of tied and that that shows that you know, people

Paul Bragan: A aren’t really sure. And B think all of these things are are

Paul Bragan: important challenges and barriers

Paul Bragan: when we look at them amongst the different audiences, I mean, there’s slight degrees. There’s differences, but they’re sort of degrees of difference the degrees of difference, not not really differences in in the top 2 or top 3 priorities, you know.

Paul Bragan: fin ops professionals. They they tend to feel that the key obstacle to overcome is being viewed as a separate ident, a separate entity, executives and business leaders. They tended to be more focused on trying to solve that the knowledge gap, the skill set gap developers, engineers, they tend to be more focused on

Paul Bragan: the different reporting structures and organizational silos as their top concerns. But these are nuanced differences. These are differences in degrees. They’re really people thought all of these things are are important concerns and barriers. There wasn’t 1 thing that rose above the rest.

William Norton: We kind of turn the page into

William Norton: talking about kind of what we see is critical maturity. Kpi

William Norton: wanna maybe set the

William Norton: the context here, as we think about all of what we saw in the last few slides, and I would say, the

William Norton: the kind of ongoing complexity and pressure that finops teams are feeling. There’s been this shift in the community and we we saw it at Fenops X. We hear it with our customers. We certainly thought in the state of finops around. Okay, well, there’s all these kind of organizational, cultural things that need to get done. And we.

William Norton: I I think most Finops teams have resolved themselves to having to be kind of change agents for businesses. And then, at the same time, there’s functional things that need to happen to affect that change. And and there’s a layer of, we think about kind of people process and technology. There’s a layer of well, the technology has to help us scale this out and overcome these things so that we can be focused on

William Norton: what? What really is kind of the the organizational change management required to make them that goal.

William Norton: We asked a question about insight to action.

William Norton: which we’ll we’ll kind of dissect in in a little bit, and I know there’s a a lot here on this on this screen. But if I was to give you a too long didn’t read

William Norton: the insight to action. Kpi, if you will, is really focused on from the time that a a team becomes aware of a cost, anomaly, or waste

William Norton: in the cloud, what is the total time it takes to resolve that waste in the cloud.

William Norton: And when you ask the question just

William Norton: based on your knowledge and experience, to all of these cohorts. What do you think your average insight to action? Time is

William Norton: most were very confident, saying it. It takes days or longer to respond.

William Norton: At best, and then you’ve got 31%, you know, who are saying this oftentimes will take weeks or months, and for those of us who have been in the finops. World, you know. We know that it it largely depends on on what workloads we’re talking about, and maybe what part of of our cloud that we’re talking about. But there absolutely are instances where this lead time to action.

William Norton: Can take quarters, if not years, to be resolved. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. We’ll talk about kind of where we think technology plays here. But, Paul, is there anything on this question that you wanted to

William Norton: call out specifically.

Paul Bragan: No, I mean, I think the 67 and the 31 tell the best story, which is just, you know.

Paul Bragan: Wow! The fact that 2 out of 3 are saying it’s taking a long time, and then

Paul Bragan: one in 3 is saying it’s taking effectively, you know.

Paul Bragan: forever. I mean, it’s taking an incredible amount of time. We saw the we saw those alarms consistently when we looked at the different size organizations. It’s a consistent story. Yeah.

William Norton: So at the same time, and we’ll open up to Kyle and Yasmin in a second to talk about this in in general, but at the same time, you know, we kind of asked the question.

William Norton: do you know, do you feel that technology should be the answer

William Norton: and the overwhelming majority agree that you know finance is not going to be able to reach its full potential without advanced tooling.

William Norton: With things like AI and Ml to kind of accelerate that insight to action.

William Norton: for for optimization and other tasks in the cloud.

William Norton: I’m gonna switch forward to this next slide around kind of what, how we feel, that plays out in a perfect world, and what you know Nirvana should look like

William Norton: but as I do that, you know, I’ll I’ll toss it over to Kyle. Can you talk through? You know why we feel there’s this golden metric around insight to action, and how we think about obviously the technical layer. But then there’s people in profit that we know all kind of come together to to create that that period of time between insight and action. And you know, if you get that insight to action down, you really are showing a lot of maturity in your finance practice.

Kyle Campos: Yeah, I I think it’s a key metric, because it is the system metric of from beginning to end.

Kyle Campos: How many humans are involved? How much time does it take the human to react to a data point, to then to you know, to receive, there’s lead time to actually receive that data point, to analyze it. Then to make a decision about what what happens next?

Kyle Campos: There’s approval processes, etc. So that sort of beginning to end. Insight to action lead time is indicative of the entire, you know, value stream process or waste cycle of your entire organization, and sometimes in fact, most times, especially with that last data point.

Kyle Campos: It’s an eye watering, scary figure to to add up

Kyle Campos: and I think you know.

Kyle Campos: when you

Kyle Campos: when you do that analysis.

Kyle Campos: If you’re

Kyle Campos: optimization process in, you know how you evaluate and improve cloud Roi

Kyle Campos: is more closely tied to like

Kyle Campos: quarterly tax preparation than like a continuously continuous optimization and pipelines executing off off of you know, real time telemetry. It’s closer to quarterly tax prep where you’re analyzing cloud receipts and humans are, may, you know, going through their emotional responses of Oh, my gosh! That’s been a wasteful thing like, how do we get the teams to behave differently. You’re in a you’re in a poor spot, and I think right now we are

Kyle Campos: as an industry, but certainly a couple

Kyle Campos: as a as a vendor solution is is saying, practitioners can’t accept that dynamic anymore. Businesses certainly can’t absorb the waste generated by those you know. Human episodic driven processes. We need

Kyle Campos: the augmented finops. Aiml driven insights to be able to

Kyle Campos: quicken the pace, but also.

Kyle Campos: you know, attack the most the areas that are most driving waste. And that is very difficult for humans to do. I think you know. And Yasmin, your your context, this is, it’s it’s really clear, because that type of telemetry is is all that can influence these decisions. Humans can’t possibly evaluate all those signals and make decisions at all.

Yasmin: Yeah, definitely. And that’s where I think we see the majority of these initiatives kind of fail. Humans will try and don’t get me wrong for a subset of your infrastructure. You can spend a lot of effort. Figure out what changes you need to make. Deploy those changes, get all the approvals, and that’s great once. But then, once you put that in place tomorrow, it’s out of date. Do the dynamic nature of your environment due to just traffic patterns changing and

Yasmin: like it, like you mentioned, humans can’t possibly look at all that data. It’s all structured. It’s all essentially the same type of data that just changes and it’s perfect for machine learning. And in order to make any of these initiatives successful, it can’t be a 1 and done thing. It has to be continuous. It has to always be looking, always be addressing it. And it’s the only way you can actually get this down to seconds like you mentioned.

William Norton: I’d love to ask the question, because I know this has come up, and I I see it in some of the polling. We’re actually doing right now. There’s always been hesitation in

William Norton: the

William Norton: I I certainly say I’m I’m more of the cloud engineering side as spin off. Leaders have said, Hey, we, we have this automation tool that will help do this all behind the scenes.

William Norton: And and oftentimes I was met, you know, a couple of years ago as a consultant with

William Norton: that looks like a lot of risk. And it is just. It just does not allow me to put the type of logic that I know I have

William Norton: to ensure that we’re we’re making the right decisions, I just.

William Norton: And it’s far too dangerous for me to run at scale.

William Norton: And there’s been a lot of talk in the community right now around, okay, we know we need automation.

William Norton: But we know the automation that we’ve been historically

William Norton: handing out to the rest of the organization has been met with a lot of like, no way.

William Norton: that’s not gonna work.

William Norton: You know. Both of you are product leaders.

William Norton: I’d love for you to kind of respond to that and talk about, how can we make automation more practical

William Norton: and and get that degree of confidence a lot higher, because, you know, we know on the other side, cloud engineering teams use automation all the time at the part of everything that they do it just feels like it always fell short in this one contact. So Kyle.

Kyle Campos: I’ll I’ll I’ll go real quick and get it. Get it to Yasmin as well. But here’s here’s what I’ve always told my my platform teams, etc.

Kyle Campos: Codify your anxiety like if if you are, if you are standing there saying only I can interpret a B or C, or make a wise judgment about ABC. ABC, I would say, if it’s not in the pipeline, it’s not a real. It’s not a real concern. It can’t be that important to you. If you can’t codify that decisioning

Kyle Campos: build in protection like, wh, what do you? What do you think the risk is? Codify it in

Kyle Campos: cloud engineering in general. I I would just say this. I’ll maybe my last controversial thought, and I’ll hand it to you, Yasmin.

Kyle Campos: There was a lot more complex automation happening in this world with much higher stakes.

Kyle Campos: Then just

Kyle Campos: cloud optimization and scale decisions. Right? There’s, you know, a lot of automated security decisions that could ruin companies that are happening all of the time.

Kyle Campos: There’s, you know, there’s multi cloud

Kyle Campos: failover decisions happening for large e-commerce companies

Kyle Campos: that could that could cost a a company tens of millions of dollars with that with bad decisioning there. So the the level of complexity we’re operating at here, I think, is pretty basic, and I think it shows some of the siloing between Finopsin and the engineering teams that this is still a large concern.

Kyle Campos: Yasmin, your thoughts tell me I’m crazy.

Yasmin: Yeah, no, no, you’re not. And you mentioned how similar this initiative is to the Devops days. So before Stormforge, I spent many years at puppet.

Yasmin: and people had the same fear of like, Oh, you’re gonna detect drift and then automatically change it. And the reality is to get anyone bought into automation, especially machine learning, driven automation. You have to give them the proof points upfront like they need to be able to see that all of their fears like you mentioned. If they can codify them, can they see that? Okay, if this was to run, it wouldn’t impact me poorly.

Yasmin: And giving really humans control over the automation and the machine learning, putting in guardrails, saying, allowing them to put inputs like, don’t deploy this unless it’s X percent larger or slowly, gradually deploy this out so that I can watch the impacts and feel confident before I pull the trigger to deploy it everywhere. It’s kind of building those gates into the automation to let the humans feel like they’re in control, which

Yasmin: they should be and get that confidence upfront before. Just like turning it all on all or nothing.

William Norton: Thank you both.

William Norton: I’ve tried to weave some of the questions that we’ve received throughout. I I don’t think there’s anything that has been left unanswered. I will

William Norton: open it up, though, if there are any questions feel free to put those in the chat.

William Norton: and I can hang on for a few more minutes, and for any of our panelists who can hang out. We can

William Norton: give a few more seconds. But in the meantime I want to thank everybody who was able to join

William Norton: for jumping on and to our panelists for taking the time. Today, this has been great. Obviously we will have the recording available and sent out to everybody who showed interest.

William Norton: So with that I’ll give a few more seconds. But

William Norton: thanks everybody for joining.

Kyle Campos: Thanks everyone, appreciate it.

Yasmin: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

William Norton: Alright. Looks like we are good. Thanks, everybody. We will send a follow up via email. And Yasmin, Paul Kyle appreciate you all joining.

William Norton: Have a good rest of your day.

Paul Bragan: Welcome. Thank you.