The Foundation is also responding to requests from practitioners to extend its framework to cover other areas of IT, such as private cloud, SaaS, licensing, and on-prem data centers. “We’ve had to make some quick changes to the FinOps framework,” Storment says. “FinOps is starting to become this reporting backbone across variable technology spends.” That interest is one reason why the FinOps Foundation community doubled to 60,000 participants last year.
CarMax, in addition, built a cross-functional team, reporting to the CIO, that uses many of the principles put forth by the FinOps Foundation. But his organization developed its own model, says Mohammad. While it’s not formally following the framework, “as it matures, we’re looking at it as a benchmark,” he says. And its FinOps principles aren’t limited to public cloud or SaaS. “Most FinOps principles have been applied to technology financials as a whole,” he adds.
Why the interest in extending FinOps? “A big spender on AWS might have billions of tiny charges in a single month,” Storment says. “After managing that volume of data for the cloud, it’s easy to add other types of spend.” That’s one reason why, in the FinOps Foundation’s 2025 State of FinOps survey of 861 of its members, 65% said their FinOps practices are also being asked to optimize spend for SaaS, as well as licensing (49%), private cloud (39%), data centers (36%), and AI (63%). In addition, according to the report, 97% of respondents are investing in multiple infrastructure areas for AI, which reinforces and accelerates how managing an organization’s AI spend will require taking on new areas of spend for FinOps practitioners.
