The FinOps Foundation announced its formation today, saying it aims to advance best practices, education and standard for cloud financial management.

Backed by the Linux Foundation, the FinOps Foundation said it’s focused on “codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards” in order to help enterprise technology consumers become better at cloud financial management.

FinOps is an operating model for businesses that combines systems, best practices and culture to help them better understand cloud costs and information technology benefits. The FinOps Foundation likens it to the DevOps model that revolutionized software development by breaking down barriers between developers and operators to help increase agility. It says that FinOps is able to increase the business value of the cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new set of processes.

“FinOps ensures that companies get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud,” the FinOps Foundation says in its pitch. “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.”

Businesses can certainly benefit from FinOps. Gartner Inc. forecasts cloud spending to exceed $354 billion by 2020. But many companies lack insight into how they’re spending their cloud budgets and suffer from uncontrolled costs that can’t be properly forecast or documented. Combined with a lack of standardized tooling, it means there’s a potential for companies to suffer big losses and major accounting practice errors.

The FinOps Foundation’s founding members include Apptio Inc., Cloudeasier SAS, Cloudsoft Professional Service Co. Ltd., CloudWize Owl Ltd., Contino Ltd., Datagrid Systems, Inc., Kubecost, Neos IT Services GmbH, ProsperOps Inc., Timspirit SAS and VMware Inc.

“With demand for new collaboration to support cloud procurement between IT and finance teams, the FinOps community is growing fast,” FinOps Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment said in a statement. “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.”

In order to try and spread the basic concepts of the FinOps Foundation, the community is defining cloud finances management standards and offering classes and certification. These include a free edX course called Introduction to FinOps that covers the basics of FinOps and how it can help companies to build a culture of accountability around cloud use, so as to help them make better, data-backed spending decisions. The course is open for enrollment now.

The foundation also announced a list of FinOps Certified Platform providers that offer software that can help companies to successfully adopt cloud financial management best practices. Launch partners include Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth by VMware, CloudwWize, Kubecost, Opsani and ProsperOps.

There’s also a list of FinOps Certified Service Providers that have deep experience in helping enterprises successfully adopt cloud financial management best practices, including Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, Contino, Neos and Timespirit.

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