Guest: Mat Ellis (LinkedIn)
Company: Finout (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Mat Ellis, Finout Board Member, to discuss how FinOps helps organizations achieve value and financial accountability by enabling business, finance, and engineering teams collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Ellis shares his professional background, working for large companies like PepsiCo and Goldman Sachs, doing global infrastructure during the ‘90s before moving into ad tech with big data. He discusses how he started helping people move to the cloud and their challenges with keeping track of spending.
• Ellis explains his journey to FinOps and the need to use a common language and tools to line up expenses with income and ROI, taking inspiration from supply chain technology. Finout is one of those platforms that get the core of FinOps. It is helping to solve billing problems by giving companies insight into their total technology cost.
• Managing cloud costs has become a serious problem for organizations and Ellis feels that we are just at the precipice of adoption. He believes that there is still a lot of work to do as we move towards only writing the software that is specific and advantageous for your business and the rest being bought and joined together.
• Many still look to writing their own modules instead of paying for software every month, which does not take into consideration opportunity costs or responding to regulatory changes. Ellis points out that agility and opportunity cost still have not progressed very far in the mainstream with many still clinging onto technologies from 10 years ago rather than evaluating things and going with what is best at that time.
• FinOps works by linking your costs to your revenue, enabling better cooperation between the business, finance, and engineering teams. Ellis discusses how the business-strategic level needs to understand the strategic advantages of cloud and the agility and opportunities it can bring. Of course, there is a cost to achieve this and it needs to be done efficiently.
• 60% of Fortune 100 companies practice FinOps in some way, but Ellis feels that every company should be thinking about FinOps.
• Ellis shares his journey from selling his company to deciding to join the Board of Finout. He believes Finout truly understands FinOps and wants to take the tool into a very agile space.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.