FinOps in Action

This week's episode of FinOps in Action takes a different shape, with PointFive Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Gal Ben-David stepping in to host a conversation with Mike Graff, Infrastructure Architecture Director at Dolby Laboratories and a FinOps Ambassador. Mike shares a couple of real cost inefficiencies he's tracked down in the wild, then the conversation opens up into bigger questions...

This episode of FinOps in Action pulls together voices from across the industry, including Pathik Sharma of Google Cloud, Emily Cornock, Kevin Mueller, Zach Johnson, Henrique, Shailaja Beeram, Marit Hughes, and Oliver Milke, all wrestling with the same question: how do you actually manage the cost of AI. Two years ago the idea of "AI for FinOps" got brushed off as premature. Now it sits in the top...

What happens when you put the strategic and operational sides of FinOps in the same room? In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck welcomes two guests for the first time on the show, Sean Kennedy, Senior Cloud FinOps Consultant, and Amanda Wagner, Cloud FinOps Consultant, both from Trace3. Sean focuses on presales strategy and partner enablement across Trace3's FinOps practice, while...

What if the biggest mistake your FinOps program makes is skipping the requirements phase entirely? In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Piotr Kuczmera, Head of FinOps at ZF Group, to unpack how he built a FinOps practice from scratch at a 150,000 person global enterprise, and why the first question every organization should ask is not "how do we cut costs" but "wha...

What if the biggest cloud savings opportunity isn't hidden in your infrastructure, but in the decisions made before the first line of code is written? In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Ruby Agarwal, VP of Engineering at Avaya, whose responsibilities span engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, CloudOps, and FinOps. Ruby shares how her team reduced cloud spend by 75% in just two mo...

What does agentic FinOps actually look like in practice, and how should practitioners start thinking about it? Taylor Houck sits down with Pathik Sharma, Cloud Cost Optimization Lead at Google Cloud and Cofounder of their Cloud FinOps practice, to talk about how AI is closing the gap between knowing and doing in FinOps. Pathik shares how teams can hand off low risk tasks like tagging and labeling...

What if the best FinOps practitioners are the ones who never set out to be FinOps practitioners at all? In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Gerard Sanchez, Head of Enterprise Platforms and Cloud Technology at Resolution Life, to unpack what it actually looks like to build a cloud engineering, DevOps, and FinOps practice from absolute zero at a company that was onl...

What if the biggest driver of cloud waste isn't what shows up in your billing dashboard? In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Mike Jaco, who spent years at Mastercard running one of the most sophisticated hybrid cost programs in enterprise technology. A unified TBM and FinOps practice covering a multi-billion dollar technology budget, on-prem and public cloud, under a single...

What if the biggest cost problem in your organization never shows up on your cloud bill? In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Kumar Singirikonda, Director of DevOps Engineering at Toyota Financial Services, FinOps Foundation board member, and author of the DevOps Automation Cookbook. Kumar makes the case that FinOps as we know it is only the first chapter, and the...

Are "bad tagging" and "unused resources" really the problem, or just the symptoms of a bigger one? In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with senior FinOps manager Chitra Jadhav to explore what it truly takes to build a FinOps practice that lasts not just one that generates a list of recommendations nobody acts on. Drawing on eight years of building FinOps programs from the ground up acr...

What if your biggest cloud inefficiency isn’t how much you’re using, but how long your workloads are running? In this special episode of FinOps in Action , PointFive’s Co-Founder and CPO, Gal Ben David sits down with Matan Ben-Ishay, leading FP&A, Engineering, and Cloud Infrastructure at Credit Karma, to unpack a real world cloud efficiency discovery that led to tens of millions of dollars in...

How do you make cloud data costs transparent and actionable when thousands of users share the same platform? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Oliver Milke from TD, who shares how he built a Data FinOps practice from the ground up inside a large financial institution, starting as a team of one and scaling into a dedicated function. Coming from a background in economics and fina...

Are “idle resources” really the problem, or just the easiest one to fix? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with cloud architect and engineer Shailaja Beeram to explore a fundamentally different perspective: cost inefficiencies don’t start in the billing file, but in architectural decisions made long before deployment. Drawing on over 15 years of experience across AWS, Azure, and GCP...

Are you actually measuring the value of your cloud spend or just tracking the cost? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Kevin Mueller, Principal Architect of Cloud FinOps at Presidio, to unpack one of the most talked-about and most misunderstood concepts in FinOps: unit economics. With over 20 years of experience spanning software engineering, AWS SaaS architecture, and cloud fin...

Why do cloud costs stay high even after you build all the right dashboards? In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu, Founder and Cloud Optimization Specialist at Leaner Cloud. With over 20 years in systems engineering and a background at Nokia, HERE Technologies, and AWS, Cristian built AutoSpotting, an open source tool that has helped more than 10,000 cust...

Why do so many FinOps practitioners miss the biggest savings opportunities, and what does getting technical have to do with it? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Nick Sudarikov, Finance Director of Technology Operations at InvestCloud, to break down how a background in finance and capital markets can actually make you a sharper, more effective FinOps practitioner. Nick shares h...

Why are your cloud costs so high and what actually fixes them? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Jason Ward, Lead FinOps Practitioner at C.H. Robinson, to break down how to take control of cloud spend without slowing down engineering. Jason shares how he went from mechanic to FinOps leader, built a FinOps function from scratch, and uncovered massive savings, including a 90% cos...

What does it really take to turn cloud cost chaos into a sustainable FinOps practice, and why do most organizations get it wrong from the start? In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Loic Fournier, Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS and 2025 AWS Technical Field Community Legend. With over 25 years in technology, from mainframes to modern cloud, Loic has become one of the most r...

Why does cloud cost optimization only start after it’s already too late? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Jai Padmanabhan, who shares why cloud cost is no longer just a finance concern; it’s a core responsibility for engineering teams. Drawing on decades of experience leading platforms in complex and regulated environments, Jai explains how the shift to the cloud fundamentally...

If you can’t see where your cloud spend is going, how can you possibly control it? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Stijn Depril, FinOps Architect at Euroclear and Co-Founder of Costra. He shares why cloud visibility is the starting point for any successful FinOps practice. Drawing on decades of experience in infrastructure and cloud architecture, he explains how many organiza...

How do you move from chasing $15 cloud savings to building a scalable FinOps program that actually drives impact? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Chandan Bukkapatnam, Senior Cloud FinOps Analyst at Procore Technologies, to unpack what it really takes to mature a FinOps practice from tactical cost-cutting to strategic influence. Chandan shares how he intentionally built his ca...

What if the biggest mistake new FinOps teams make isn’t missing savings, but executing them too soon? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Henrique Amorim, Business Analyst and FinOps Specialist at Crayon. He shares an honest look at what it really takes to build a successful FinOps practice. From resisting the urge to immediately slash costs to navigating engineering relationship...

What is FinOps really? Is it just about cutting cloud costs? In this episode of FinOps in Action , Rense Siegmund, Founder of FinOps Academy and FinOps Lead at Gasunie, shares a practical perspective on what FinOps actually is and why it’s about far more than technical cloud optimization. With a background in coaching and team development, he brings a unique lens to cloud cost management: collabor...

Why do so many FinOps programs struggle to prove business value? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Tamara Lajara, FinOps Principal Consultant at SoftwareOne, to break down what real FinOps value looks like and why culture, governance, and visibility matter just as much as savings.  Drawing from more than a decade of consulting experience across industries, cloud maturity levels...

Why does FinOps work better when teams own outcomes instead of being told what to do? In this episode of FinOps in Action , I sit down with Trig Ghosh, FinOps SME at Accenture Federal Services, certified FinOps instructor, and founding contributor to the Cloud Efficiency Hub, to unpack what actually drives lasting FinOps success. Trig shares hard-earned lessons from building a FinOps Center of Exc...