FinOps X 2025 concluded last week in San Diego, marking our fourth year participating in the largest conference for the FinOps community. From engineers and FinOps leads to finance partners and platform owners, the event brings together a diverse group of practitioners working to solve the biggest challenges in cloud financial management.
ProsperOps spent the week meeting on-site with customers and partners, demonstrating how our leading rate and workload automations work, educating attendees about the evolution of Effective Savings Rate (ESR 2.0), and connecting with peers. We also co-hosted the official FinOps X 8-Bit Afterparty for our third consecutive year!
This recap includes highlights from the conference, key announcements, and an overview of our experience at FinOps X 2025.
ProsperOps at Booth 12
Across conversations, the focus was clear: teams want to improve savings, reduce risk, and get more business value from their commitments without relying on manual tracking or guesswork. Attendees were interested to learn how ProsperOps automates commitment management across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, and how our customers have already realized over $2 billion in savings, and counting!
Practitioners were also interested to learn about ProsperOps Scheduler and how it seamlessly integrates with our leading rate optimization automation. The feedback was evident: teams are excited to integrate and automate rate and workload optimizations.
Our FinOps fortune teller, aka ProsperBot Predicts, kept people smiling between sessions and sparked a few good conversations about the unpredictability of cloud spend. People could press a button to reveal their FinOps fortune, and win prizes!
Breakout Session: Effective Savings Rate 2.0
Our breakout session on Effective Savings Rate 2.0, led by ProsperOps co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Erik Carlin, and FinOps Lead at Boomi, Eric Mulartrick, was well received and well-attended!
The session focused on how Effective Savings Rate (ESR) has evolved beyond a basic savings metric to become a more comprehensive formula for tracking rate optimization performance across clouds. Eric and Erik educated attendees on ESR 2.0 and how it accounts for different pricing models, discount instruments, and cloud providers, making ESR 2.0 a more accurate and actionable metric for FinOps teams.
The session also featured a success story from Boomi, highlighting how the team improved their AWS Compute ESR from 26.4 percent to 43.8 percent, landing in the 95th percentile among peers. That uplift translated to millions in incremental savings and significantly less time spent managing discount instruments. Boomi also shared early results from their Azure environments, where ProsperOps helped push ESRs to over 39 percent. The session reinforced how ESR can serve as a measurable, cross-cloud benchmark for FinOps maturity.
To wrap up the session, we introduced two new FinOps KPIs: Effective Cost Optimization Rate (ECOR) and Effective Avoidance Rate (EAR). ECOR measures the combined impact of rate and usage optimization on overall cloud spend, while EAR focuses specifically on the savings generated by avoiding unnecessary usage.
Key Announcements and Community Focus Areas
This year’s keynotes and working sessions reflected a clear focus on operational maturity, financial accountability, and adapting FinOps practices for AI and multi-cloud environments. A few notable announcements and themes stood out:
FOCUS 1.2
The latest FOCUS release marks an important step toward standardizing cost and usage data across cloud and SaaS services. FOCUS 1.2 adds support for SaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) billing, enabling broader visibility into “Cloud+” spend within the same reporting model. Key enhancements include improved allocation fields, currency normalization, and invoice-level tracking.
Major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle, continue to align with the FOCUS specification, signaling industry-wide momentum toward more consistent and centralized cloud cost reporting. As support expands, organizations can expect to spend less time normalizing billing data and more time acting on the insights gained.
FinOps for AI
AI cost management was a recurring theme at FinOps X, with a substantial number of sessions dedicated to the topic. As generative AI experiments expand, teams are beginning to address cost factors such as model selection, training, token usage, and caching.
While AI spend is still relatively low for most organizations today, it is expected to increase quickly as production use cases expand. Many FinOps teams are still in the early stages of developing AI-specific cost practices and are working closely with data or business teams to track and control spend.
The Cloud+ Era
FinOps is no longer just for cloud infrastructure. The FinOps Foundation formally updated its framework to include “cloud and technology,” signaling a broader scope that now includes SaaS, on-prem, and adjacent disciplines like IT financial management (ITFM), IT asset management (ITAM), IT service management (ITSM), software asset management (SAM), sustainability, and IT security.
This expansion is driven by demand. As the ROI of FinOps becomes more widely understood, leaders are applying its practices to more areas of IT spend.
Supporting this shift, the FinOps Foundation announced a strategic partnership with the ITAM Forum, aligning FinOps with software asset management.
AI for FinOps
AI is starting to play a larger role in the practice of FinOps itself. Rather than just managing AI workloads, teams are exploring how AI can support day-to-day FinOps tasks, such as anomaly detection, usage analysis, and waste identification.
Many providers and platforms are introducing AI-powered tools to surface spend patterns earlier, flag unusual activity, and generate more actionable reporting. While still in early stages, the potential is clear. AI has the ability to reduce manual overhead, accelerate decision-making, and help teams transition from reactive to proactive cost management.
Product-Aware FinOps and Shift-Left Practices
Another key theme was the growing effort to bring cost visibility earlier into the development lifecycle. Rather than reviewing spend after deployment, more organizations are embedding FinOps practices into design, build, and planning phases.
This shift provides engineering teams with a better context for making cost-aware decisions upfront, whether it’s selecting services, shaping architecture, or understanding the long-term impact of workload choices. As FinOps practices mature, aligning engineering and finance earlier is becoming a clear priority.
ProsperOps 8-Bit Afterparty
We closed out the event with the third edition of our 8-Bit Afterparty, cohosted with CloudZero and ScaleOps. It was an opportunity to step away from the conference floor, catch up with peers, and unwind after a packed schedule.
With arcade games, rooftop views, and a full room from start to finish, the night brought together a mix of familiar faces and new connections. The 8-bit Afterparty has quickly become a FinOps X tradition, and it remains one of our favorite ways to bring the community together.
Until Next Time, FinOps X!
FinOps X 2025 was a success with insightful sessions, meaningful conversations, and a shared focus on building smarter, more efficient cloud operations.
Thank you to everyone who connected with us. If we missed you, please feel free to connect with us online!
Book a demo to see how ProsperOps can help your team achieve more savings with zero manual effort.
