FinOps at Runtime: Because “Oops, That Was Expensive” Isn’t a Strategy
LinkedIn
February 27, 2026
Most companies today are treating AI like a Vegas trip. Spin it up. See what happens. Hope the bill isn’t too painful. And to be fair… that’s not entirely wrong. Early AI should feel a little chaotic. Exploration matters. Curiosity matters. Learning matters.
But here’s the problem no one wants to say out loud, AI doesn’t become expensive because it’s powerful. It becomes expensive because it’s unmanaged.
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Tags: IT Leadership, IT Strategy, Transformation
Optimizing Ai
Linkedin
September 22, 2025
In 2024 alone, Fortune 500 companies spent over $40 billion on AI infrastructure across GPUs, storage, and networking. And here’s the kicker, according to Gartner and internal FinOps data, 35–50% of that spend quietly delivered little to no business value. Idle GPU clusters, over-provisioned training jobs, “experiments” that never made it to production, the waste is staggering.
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Tags: FinTech, Leadership, Transformation
Making Every Bean Count!
LinkedIn
June 17, 2025
In June 2020, Starbucks (David Rogan) recruited me with a straightforward mission, “Help save money in the cloud.” Simple enough, right? Turns out, it was anything but easy. Because if you’ve ever tried getting engineers to talk about cloud costs, you know it’s a lot like asking a two-year-old, “What’s in your mouth?”, they ran. Fast.
At first, we felt like that unexpected houseguest who shows up with luggage and no warning, engineers had no time for us, no space for us, and frankly, weren’t sure why we were even there. They were busy building, innovating, solving real problems. Cloud efficiency? That sounded like someone else’s problem. Except it wasn’t. And if we were going to work, we couldn’t just show up, we had to prove we could help them win. We were just another finance-driven initiative, something engineers neither needed nor had the bandwidth to engage with. Conversations were brief, interest was minimal, and the sound of crickets echoed through our inboxes.
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Tags: Business Strategy, IT Strategy, Transformation
Driving Impact with Relentless Focus
LinkedIn
May 16, 2025
In any field, the fundamental question we must ask is, are we optimizing for the things that truly matter? When it comes to cloud (& Infra), the potential to drive cost efficiency and value creation is extraordinary, but only when the willingness changes one to think differently and act decisively.
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Tags: Business Strategy, Leadership, Transformation
Driving Impact with Relentless Focus
LinkedIn
April 29, 2025
In any field, the fundamental question we must ask is, are we optimizing for the things that truly matter? When it comes to cloud (& Infra), the potential to drive cost efficiency and value creation is extraordinary, but only when the willingness changes one to think differently and act decisively.
We’ve always believed in the power of operating at the intersection of customer first, operational efficiency, and invention. FinOps is no exception. By leveraging first principles thinking and relentlessly focusing on what delivers value, organizations can achieve cloud optimization at an unprecedented scale.
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Tags: IT Leadership, IT Strategy, Transformation
Architecting an Experience of Trust
LinkedIn
March 28, 2025
In FinOps trust isn’t a luxury, it’s the cornerstone that prevents the entire structure from crumbling under the weight of misinformed decisions.
But earning trust isn’t about relying on intuition or hoping the numbers align. It’s about delivering quality data that’s accurate, relevant, and consistently reliable. Without that foundation, our cost optimizations, forecasts, and recommendations risk becoming costly missteps.
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Tags: Business Strategy, IT Strategy, Transformation
The Cost of Failure
LinkedIn
July 18, 2024
Understanding unit economics helps a company determine not just the average cost, but also the fluctuations, revealing the highs and lows of technology usage and expenses. But I've found that focusing solely on the average cost of technology use can be misleading. Instead, I've learned the immense value of drilling down into the cost of failure. This isn't just a financial exercise; it's a strategic imperative that shapes the resilience and reliability of operations.
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Tags: IT Leadership, IT Strategy, Transformation
Shift Left - Creating a Proactive FinOps Strategy to Maximize Business Investments.
LinkedIn
June 06, 2024
As the digital era progresses, it's crucial for us to adapt and ensure our application development processes are both highly efficient and financially responsible. While cloud architecture and security reviews are a standard, we must not overlook the significance of FinOps. Indispensable in ensuring that developers are using the most cost-effective products for each workload, how do you change from a reactive posture and empower our developers to continue to make magic. You find a way to make it easier for them!
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Tags: Transformation
Cloud Resiliency
LinkedIn
July 20, 2023
Aren't you impressed by the capabilities cloud computing offers? It's a turbo-charged, rocket-fueled, mind-bending leap into the digital stratosphere. But you may need to brace yourselves for a wild ride, as this ever-changing landscape should be met with with the agility of an acrobatic maestro and the cunning of a tech-savvy ninja.
Truth be told, cloud monogamy is so last season, like wearing socks with sandals (guilty). It's time to embrace the polyamorous nature of the cloud and explore a world where different clouds come together in a unity of greatness. It's like a buffet of technological awesomeness, where we can savor the delectable flavors of security, scalability, and innovation. Forget about being tied down to one cloud vendor; let's dance with them all!
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Tags: Business Strategy, IT Strategy, Transformation
The Promising Horizon
LinkedIn
May 26, 2023
Unveiling the Future of Cloud Technology and Infrastructure
Cloud technology has emerged as a game-changer in the digital era, revolutionizing the way businesses and individuals manage, store, and access their data. As we venture into the future, the potential of cloud technology and infrastructure continues to expand exponentially, shaping the way we collaborate, innovate, and interact with the digital world. In this article, we delve into the exciting prospects that lie ahead, exploring the advancements and transformative trends that will shape the future of cloud technology and infrastructure.
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Tags: Business Strategy, IT Strategy, Transformation
Cloud Cost Challenges in Large Organizations | FinOps Perspective
YouTube
February 16, 2026
As organisations scale, cloud cost management becomes less about tools and more about structure and alignment. In this episode of the FinOps on Azure Podcast, Benjamin Linares shares a practitioner’s perspective on the cloud cost challenges large organisations face, including ownership models, reporting structures, leadership support, and organisational alignment and why these factors often determine FinOps success or failure.
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Tags: IT Strategy, Leadership, Transformation
Five Ways For SaaS Companies To Stand Out By Leveraging FinOps
Forbes
June 20, 2024
The software as a service (SaaS) market is fiercely competitive, with approximately 31,000 companies vying for dominance. One emerging methodology gaining traction is financial operations, or FinOps. At its core, FinOps unites finance, engineering and product teams to optimize cloud costs and enhance financial decision-making. Here are five key ways that SaaS companies can effectively integrate FinOps into their platforms to drive success and growth.
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Tags: Business Strategy, Emerging Technology, FinTech
Bridging the Gap: FinOps Strategies That Align Engineering and Finance
The New Stack
September 30, 2025
Sharing actionable FinOps strategies that bridge the gap, turn budget conversations into business alignment, and help leaders build confidence into every tech investment.
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Tags: IT Leadership, Leadership, Transformation
Proof of Spend: Making Cloud Value Clear
Harness
July 30, 2025
Cloud costs are under the microscope—and engineering leaders are expected to deliver answers. How do you prove the value of your cloud investments without getting buried in spreadsheets?
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Tags: FinTech, Leadership, Transformation
Starbucks: Making Every Bean Count
YouTube
July 11, 2025
Hear Ben Linares share the stage with David Rogan and discuss how Starbucks achieved an 8-figure annual savings and forecasting from 35-45% down to 1-1.5% variance.
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Tags: FinTech, Leadership, Transformation
Making Every Bean Count
FinOps Foundation
July 10, 2025
Telling the story of FinOps at Starbucks.
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Tags: FinTech, Leadership, Transformation
Cloud Cost Optimization Isn’t Broken. The Approach Is.
The New Stack
January 15, 2026
Cloud spend rarely explodes overnight—it erodes quietly. A few over-provisioned workloads here, an unused environment there, and suddenly teams are optimizing after the invoice arrives. Most organizations attempt to solve this problem at the wrong stage, relying on reactive cost controls, manual audits, or finance-led governance that arrives long after architectural decisions are locked in.
Shifting left reframes cloud value as an engineering responsibility, not a financial afterthought. Instead of asking, “How do we reduce costs?” the better question is, “How do we prevent waste from being deployed in the first place?” That means embedding optimization, security, and governance directly into design, CI/CD, and deployment workflows—where decisions are cheapest to fix and easiest to automate.
In this session, we’ll define what cloud value actually means beyond raw cost savings, explore how a shift-left strategy enables proactive optimization, and show how Kubernetes environments can be continuously aligned with intent—without slowing developers down. You’ll see how architecture becomes enforceable policy, how zero-drift environments eliminate configuration entropy, and how Harness modules work together to turn best practices into defaults rather than documentation.
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Tags: DevOps, IT Strategy, Transformation
FinOps at Runtime: Because “Oops, That Was Expensive” Isn’t a Strategy
