Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025.  Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

By Kyle Campos, Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO), CloudBolt

The world of FinOps is entering a pivotal year in 2025, moving from foundational practices to becoming a strategic powerhouse. Teams that once focused on crawling through operational basics are now running toward innovation, driven by the adoption of AI-powered automation, hybrid cloud complexity, and unified cost visibility. This year, as teams hit their stride, the focus will shift toward collaborative, pragmatic decision-making. In a nutshell: FinOps is not just finding its footing-it's sprinting toward a prominent seat at the table.

From seismic acquisitions to the rise of near-real-time FinOps, this year will redefine how organizations manage cloud value, enabling smarter decisions and tangible ROI across their cloud environments.

CloudBolt Software, a leader in cloud cost management and FinOps, runs several industry reports per year around various aspects of the cloud landscape. Tapping into these findings and field expertise, here are my predictions for the year ahead:

The Audacious Bet: Microsoft Buys IBM to Rule FinOps

Cloud has seen vast acquisition and consolidation. But the biggest move is yet to come. In an effort to own the FinOps space, and in a bold move to overtake AWS, Microsoft makes the biggest gamble by vying to purchase IBM and acquire its cloud, tech, and customers in one of the largest acquisitions in history.

Evolution of FinOps Practices

2025 will mark the end of operational FinOps, shifting from operational cost managers to strategic value enablers. This transformation will be driven by two factors: the increasing complexity of hybrid cloud environments and the C-suite's growing focus on technology ROI. Organizations that fail to make this transition risk being left behind as cloud costs accelerate. This will disrupt FinOps teams that are used to being operators and not strategists, and will challenge the notion of DIY/native tooling usage.

AI Reality Check: From Gold Rush to Trough of Disillusionment

The AI gold rush will force a fundamental rethinking of cloud economics in 2025. As organizations grapple with unprecedented GPU demands and costs, we'll see laggards aggressively move to the public cloud. However, as AI progresses through the hype cycle, expect an "AI reality check" by Q3. Organizations will shift from the exuberance of "AI everything" to a more measured focus on tangible business outcomes and ROI. This tension will push cloud providers to innovate new pricing models and optimization levers for AI workloads.

Platform Consolidation & Integration Propelled by FOCUS

2025 will be the year of platform play in cloud management, catalyzed by the widespread adoption of FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification). As this standard enables unified visibility across public clouds, private infrastructure, and data centers, organizations will reject today's fragmented tooling landscape in favor of comprehensive platforms that treat their hybrid environment as a single cloud fabric. This shift will drive significant market consolidation as vendors race to deliver complete visibility and automation across all technology investments. For the first time, organizations will make truly workload-optimized decisions based on complete economic and performance data.

Cloud Value Optimization

The focus will shift from "cloud-first"' to "cloud-right" as organizations demand deeper insights into workload economics across their entire cloud fabric. Understanding unit costs, especially in private cloud environments, will become crucial for strategic decision-making. We'll see the emergence of new metrics and KPIs designed specifically to measure cloud ROI and effectiveness across hybrid environments.

AI in the Cloud Moves from "Spotting" to "Doing"

AI-driven automation will move beyond data crunching to be more actionable, automatically optimizing cloud performance and spend, and reducing the insight-to-action gap. This will be the new table stakes by the end of 2025. Agentic AI will gain rapid adoption and be integrated into workflows to accelerate AI impact such that the industry begins seeing "near real-time FinOps" for the first time. AI will play a bigger role in spotting anomalies and making decisions at moments of truth at the edge as organizations find ways to shift left.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyle is a seasoned technology veteran with a 25-year track record of building scalable, agile, and practical development projects. At CloudBolt, he leads the development of next-generation Augmented FinOps capabilities and Cloud Fabric Orchestration. CloudBolt's mission is to help enterprise customers maximize their cloud ROI.