Why FinOps Foundation Won’t Host FinOps XE Again in Europe

Before you accuse me of click biting, let me go straight to the bad part. According to reliable sources within FinOps Foundation, it is unlikely that we will have another edition of FinOps X in Europe, despite of the event huge success on the current format. More about that at the end (this is not a click bite, maybe a cliffhanging)

FinOps XE was the first edition of the congress organised by the FinOps Foundation in Europe. Other events have happened in USA (FinOps X, without the “E”), always on the first half of the year. After tons of requests from European practitioners, the FinOps Foundation decided to make the first FinOps X in Europe on the beautiful city of Barcelona.

Prior to that, FinOps Foundation had organised the FinOps Europe Day at Amsterdam, in 2023 where I had the pleasure to be one of the panellists. Other events are basically meetups made by the practitioners in specific European cities.

Fast forward to 2024, on November 11 to 14, FinOps practitioners from all over the world gathered at the beautiful W Hotel to celebrate FinOps. Not even the raining weather on the second day took the brilliance of the event.

To me, the greatest part of FinOps XE was the people. How great it was to meet with lots of friends from many companies – from practitioners to vendors. All great people that are helping advance the FinOps practice all over the world, either by putting in practice the discipline or creating technologies to make our life easier.

I would love to mention all the good folks I met, but I’m afraid of missing someone. So, in the name of all old and new friends I had the pleasure to meet, I will just mention Erik Norman, that has been my mentor on my FinOps journey and that I had a great joy to meet in person for the first time in Barcelona.

From my side, I was honoured to be one the selected speakers at the event. I talked about The Ultimate Value Indicator for Senior Leaders. It is an approach to FinOps EVM that aims to open an avenue to the value discussion, something that I see is the next step on the maturity evolution in the FinOps community as a whole.

Besides that, I would highlight other three topics discussed at FinOps XE

1. Introduction of FinOps Scopes. When FinOps was born, it was intended to address Public Cloud. But many has applied FinOps concepts on other areas. Those areas were included on the scope of FinOps, namely SaaS and Data Center. Together with Public Cloud, those are the three scopes of FinOps. It was a kick-start on the topic, as more content need to be developed to extend the capabilities on the two new scopes.
2. Artificial Intelligence. I liked the differentiation of AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI. It is something we need to put our eyes on. Due to the great demand for computing power to leverage AI, and as most of this is done on the cloud, FinOps approach for resource optimisation become more relevant.
3. The rise of FOCUS. FOCUS is seriously becoming the industry standard for billing and usage data. All four hyperscalers have adopted it. There were interesting use cases presented during the event showing how practitioners are using the specification on real life examples. Also interesting was the FOCUS Lab, a space where practitioners could go, test the dataset and get advise directly from the FOCUS maintainers. Still in this topic, I’m also proud to highlight:
   • I’ve been one of the collaborators of FOCUS v 1.0, that is the current version on the date of this article.
   • I have partnered with FinOps Foundation and other knowledgeable practitioners to write the white paper Adopting FOCUS™, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification that was launched during FinOps XE Barcelona.

Coming back to the bad part. Besides the huge success, why FinOps Foundation will not repeat the experience? The answer is capacity. The organisation of an event like this requires a huge amount of work on planning and execution. That wouldn’t be a problem if there were not other concurrent events that require similar effort, like Amazon’s AWS Reinvent (December) and Microsoft’s Ignite (November). It is also a demand from these hyperscalers, as they need to prepare for their own events and announcement.

FinOps XE 2024 Barcelona was a huge success. The combination of nice venue, great topics, exiting announcement and bright people created an immersive and enriching experience that made this event something to remember forever. I’m sad that FinOps Foundation will not (at least for now) organize something similar for the next year. They said that it is possible to organize small ones, like one day events, but nothing similar to this.

We never know what the future holds for us all. I really hope to see big FinOps events in Europe in the near future. The feeling of being “at home” was strong in Barcelona. On the other hand, it is hard for many that are on this side of the globe to travel to US. Let’s hope for the best and that the circumstances become favorable so FinOps XE can happen again.