The Hard Truth About FinOps: Why Technology Isn’t Your Biggest Challenge

A conversation with Otto Hillenbrand, IBM’s FinOps expert, reveals why most organizations are still in the “crawl phase” of financial operations and what it really takes to succeed—especially when partnering with trusted advisors like Clear Technologies.

After 30 years in enterprise technology, from Microsoft to Red Hat to his current role at IBM, Otto Hillenbrand has seen countless technology transformations. But when it comes to FinOps, he delivers a counterintuitive truth that many organizations need to hear: “The easiest part is almost the technology.”

This insight becomes particularly relevant when considering how organizations can successfully navigate FinOps transformation through strategic partnerships with experienced integrators who understand both the technical and cultural challenges ahead.

One Thing Every Successful FinOps Team Needs

The $100 Million Foundation Built on VMware

What many don’t realize about Turbonomic’s success story is how focused their early approach was. From 2009 to 2019, the company did one thing exceptionally well: optimize VMware environments. That’s it. No public cloud, no multi-platform complexity—just VMware optimization for major banks, telcos, and healthcare providers.

The result? Over $100 million in revenue before they even began optimizing AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. This laser focus on building trust through proven results in a single environment laid the foundation for everything that followed.

The Crawl Phase Reality Check

Despite the growing buzz around FinOps, Otto delivers a sobering assessment: “We are in the crawl phase of FinOps.” He’s not referring to the industry’s technological capabilities—IBM sits in Gartner’s upper right quadrant for FinOps solutions. He’s talking about organizational maturity.

The pattern is consistent across enterprises: teams claim they’re “doing FinOps,” but when you dig deeper, you find engineering teams doing basic cloud cost optimization without the cross-functional collaboration that true FinOps requires. They’re optimizing cloud spend reactively rather than building the accountability and collaboration frameworks that define mature FinOps practices.

The $3 Million Mistake: When Teams Don’t Talk

Otto shares a cautionary tale that illustrates this challenge perfectly. A client’s team had spent months optimizing their cloud infrastructure, working closely with their cloud cost optimization specialists to configure instances and negotiate better rates. They had successfully saved $6 million on their public cloud spending.

Then their finance team went away for two weeks to renegotiate their Azure contract independently.

When the new contract went into effect, half of their $3 million in savings vanished in a single month. Why? Because the cloud optimization team and the finance team never completed their collaboration. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, despite both teams working toward the same goal.

This story captures the fundamental challenge of FinOps: it’s not a technology problem, it’s a people and process problem.

The Hybrid Blind Spot

While organizations have made progress with cloud cost management, most are missing a massive piece of the puzzle: on-premises infrastructure. Otto regularly encounters FinOps teams who readily admit, “From a FinOps standpoint, we don’t think about on-prem.”

This creates a significant blind spot. Most enterprises will remain hybrid “for the rest of existence,” yet their FinOps practices are maturing only in the cloud while ignoring data center costs. Containers span both environments, but teams lack mechanisms to pull all those metrics together and understand the total value their infrastructure delivers.

IBM’s response has been to evolve tools like Cloudability beyond their cloud-centric origins to incorporate on-premises metrics, recognizing that true FinOps requires end-to-end visibility across hybrid environments.

The Hidden Reason Most FinOps Initiatives Struggle

The Technology Stack Is the Easy Part

Otto’s perspective, backed by three decades in enterprise technology, challenges conventional thinking about FinOps adoption challenges. “The interesting aspect is when you think about FinOps, the easiest part is almost the technology,” he explains.

The real challenge comes when finance teams start questioning engineering decisions that have gone unquestioned for years. It’s uncomfortable when someone starts asking, “Why are you doing that?” about technology choices that have become routine. But this discomfort is precisely what FinOps is designed to address through collaboration rather than confrontation.

Successful FinOps isn’t about finance telling engineering how to do their jobs. It’s about recognizing that “we’re all in the boat together” and building frameworks for accountability and collaboration across traditionally siloed teams.

The Executive Sponsor: The Make-or-Break Factor

After working with numerous FinOps implementations, Otto has identified the single common denominator among successful programs: a C-level executive sponsor who genuinely cares about the outcomes.

“I can think of three [advanced FinOps teams] off the top of my head,” Otto notes, “and they’ve all got one common denominator. The teams are all different in their structure to a certain degree, but they all have got a great executive sponsor, like a C-level executive that actually cares.”

This isn’t just about budget approval or organizational mandate. It’s about having someone at the executive level who will “go to the mat” for FinOps and drive the cultural changes necessary for success.

The Path Forward: Integrated Solutions Through Strategic Partnership

As FinOps matures, success requires more than individual tools—it demands integrated solutions that span the entire technology stack. IBM’s portfolio—spanning Turbonomic, Cloudability, KubeCost, and extending to Red Hat OpenShift, Terraform, and Ansible—addresses this integration challenge effectively.

But technology integration is only part of the solution. The more critical integration is organizational, which is where Clear Technologies’ partnership with IBM becomes invaluable. Through Clear’s Visual One platform integrated with IBM’s Cloudability, organizations can finally bridge the gap between ground-level technical metrics and high-level financial management.

As Otto notes, “Visual One is at that ground level pulling the detailed technical metrics, matching them with the financial data that’s going to roll up to the tools that are going to do the true financial management.” This integration creates the end-to-end visibility that hybrid organizations desperately need.

The partnership enables IBM to “meet you where you are in your cloud journey” with “a completely fully integrated approach as we go to market.” Rather than forcing organizations to adapt to rigid solutions, the Clear Technologies partnership allows for customized approaches that address each client’s unique hybrid infrastructure reality.

Navigating the FinOps Maze: How Clear Technologies and IBM are Leading the Charge

The Partnership Imperative: Why Cultural Transformation Requires Trusted Advisors

FinOps represents more than a new set of tools or practices—it’s a fundamental cultural shift within organizations. The $3 million mistake illustrates why organizations need experienced partners who can navigate these complex transformations successfully.

This is precisely why IBM values partnerships with organizations like Clear Technologies. As Otto explains, “The ability for you to be able to work with these clients day in and day out, they trust you… Going to FinOps, it’s a cultural shift within an organization. And you need to have Clear standing with the customer to help them along that path.”

When engineering and finance teams inevitably clash over changing processes, organizations need mediators who understand both sides. Clear Technologies’ role becomes crucial in helping clients make hard business decisions when different departments have competing priorities and perspectives.

FinOps represents more than a new set of tools or practices—it’s a fundamental cultural shift within organizations. As Otto puts it, “Going to FinOps, it’s a cultural shift within an organization.”

FinOps transformation requires trusted partners who can serve as mediators when teams with different perspectives need to find common ground. It requires executive sponsorship that goes beyond lip service to genuine commitment. And it requires moving beyond the “crawl phase” mentality to embrace the collaboration and accountability that mature FinOps demands.

The organizations that succeed will be those that recognize FinOps as fundamentally a people and process challenge, with technology serving as the enabling foundation. Through strategic partnerships like the one between IBM and Clear Technologies, organizations can access both the integrated technology stack and the cultural guidance necessary to navigate this transformation successfully.

For those still thinking of FinOps as primarily a cloud cost management exercise, the message is clear: the real opportunity—and the real work—lies in building the organizational capabilities and partnerships that make lasting transformation possible.

Watch The Full Conversation Here

Otto Hillenbrand leads IBM’s automation portfolio focusing on Turbonomic, Cloudability, and KubeCost solutions. With 30 years of enterprise technology experience spanning Microsoft, Red Hat, Salesforce, and IBM, he works with organizations navigating the complex intersection of financial operations, automation, and hybrid cloud environments.