GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Toolsv1.0

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Market Categories and Deployment Types
  3. Key Criteria Comparison
  4. GigaOm Radar
  5. Vendor Insights
  6. Analyst’s Take

1. Summary

In modern IT environments, hybrid and multicloud infrastructures are now the norm. But runaway costs due to unmonitored growth and unanticipated spend have emerged as a major challenge. Enterprise finance departments are currently unable to do accurate cost breakdowns of cloud spends to the correct cost centers, and there’s no transparency in monthly billing and no accurate forecast of future spend. This is driving the need for a new focus that cloud financial operations (FinOps) promises to resolve.

FinOps is a method of bringing financial accountability to the cloud’s operational expense (OpEx) spending model. This new way of handling financial operations allows distributed IT teams, development, and finance to work together to enable faster product delivery while managing and predicting costs.

FinOps is different from the traditional IT procurement capital expense (CapEx) model. Instead of finance allocating budgets to product teams, a cross-functional FinOps team coordinates technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting. It’s all about establishing financial accountability in cloud spending.

The GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Tools,” outlined issues, trends, and purchase considerations for prospective customers. It identified key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a FinOps platform. This companion Radar report recognizes the vendors and products that excel in their FinOps offerings.

This FinOps Radar report provides a forward-looking analysis that carefully plots the relative value and progression of the various FinOps solutions available in the market. Factors such as strategy and execution are evaluated for each vendor. In addition, highlights of each offering are presented in a short summary.

How to Read this Report

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:

Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.

GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.

Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.