VMblog spoke with Finout CEO & Co-Founder, Roi RavHon, to learn more about their recent announcement with the launch of its anomaly detection for FinOps. 

VMblog:  Let's start at the beginning. How does anomaly detection work within Finout and how will it benefit users?

Roi RavHon:  Finout's anomaly detection solution tracks back historical spend data. It calculates the anticipated future spend across all cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, plus K8s) and services such as Snowflake, Databricks and more. Each time an anomaly is detected a user can get an alert on mail or Slack, review all anomalies, and drill down in seconds to understand what happens.

VMblog:  Many software providers are taking advantage of ML and AI. What are the unique benefits to Finout's anomaly detection that users can't find anywhere else?

RavHon:  There are two main differentiators. First, the anomaly detection is part of Finout's MegaBill, which monitors all of your cloud providers and services in one central place. Second is Finout's virtual tagging, which enables companies to track cost anomalies down to the specific team or individual. This level of granularity is unprecedented and empowers everyone to manage and understand their own cost spikes.

VMblog:  In the press release, you talk a little bit about accountability. This is very interesting -- on the one hand, companies certainly want to keep better tabs on which individuals or teams are spending more than necessary. But should those individuals and teams be concerned for their autonomy?  

RavHon:  Moving into a profit mindset and scaling it up goes hand in hand with developers that are part of the solution and not part of the problem. At the end of the day, companies should be getting out of the developer's way! But they need to give developers the right tools and incentivize them to care about profitability -- then they'll be able to keep their autonomy while having a stronger impact on the bottom line of the business.

VMblog:  How are you seeing FinOps practiced? Even at advanced companies, I imagine it's still difficult to have engineers and finance teams communicate effectively and even look at the same dashboards. But is that changing?

RavHon:  It is rapidly changing! More and more FinOps professionals are hired every day and they are doing a great job at improving profitability. On the other hand, based on the latest State of FinOps survey, the most challenging problem is still accountability. Leadership needs to drive the FinOps mindset across the company and help implement modern tools that can mitigate the language barriers between engineers and finance.