The FinOps movement has reached critical mass. What started as a niche practice for cloud-native organizations is now a global imperative for any enterprise operating in the cloud. As cloud adoption scales, so does the complexity—and cost—of managing infrastructure. Financial leaders are under pressure to deliver real-time visibility, enforce accountability, and optimize spend at speed. The problem? Traditional TBM software wasn’t built for this level of agility. Enterprise IT budgets are complex—and only getting more so. As organizations scale, legacy tools like spreadsheets and disconnected systems fall short of what’s needed for modern, agile financial management.
If you’re exploring ways to automate IT budgeting and improve visibility, avoiding these common pitfalls is the place to start.
At a high level, FinOps and Technology Business Management (TBM) pursue similar goals: better cost control, stronger alignment between IT and business, and more informed decision-making. But their execution models are fundamentally different.
TBM was developed in a time when infrastructure was largely on-prem, spend was predictable, and finance teams drove the budgeting process. It’s built around top-down allocations, static reports, and centralized planning. In contrast, FinOps thrives in dynamic, cloud-first environments. It emphasizes real-time insights, cross-functional collaboration, and bottom-up accountability—especially among engineering and DevOps teams.
Where TBM provides structure, FinOps demands speed. And legacy TBM software simply isn’t keeping up.
Why Traditional TBM Tools Fall Short
Most TBM platforms were architected for IT environments that no longer exist. Traditional TBM focuses on top-down financial mapping, lagging behind the pace of cloud consumption and innovation. They can struggle with real-time, usage-based cloud spend optimization, which is a core strength of FinOps.
Modern TBM frameworks are evolving to integrate FinOps principles, but retrofitting legacy third-party systems can be slow and costly. A 2023 report from Gartner reinforces this point, noting that “organizations should avoid bolting FinOps capabilities onto legacy financial systems and instead look for platform-native solutions that can evolve with cloud maturity” (Gartner, 2023).
Proven Optics: A FinOps SaaS Platform Built for What’s Next
Proven Optics is a modern IT financial management solution built specifically to bridge the gap between TBM and FinOps. It’s not a bolt-on or workaround. It’s a purpose-built FinOps SaaS platform that lives where your teams already work—natively on ServiceNow.
Here’s how Proven Optics delivers where traditional TBM software fails:
- Native to ServiceNow
Proven Optics is architected directly on the ServiceNow platform, allowing seamless access to operational and financial data—without extra integrations or data sync issues.
- Cloud-Centric Financial Management
Track usage-based cloud costs in real time, implement showback or chargeback models, and align spending with actual business value across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Agile, Automated Forecasting
Replace static spreadsheets with dynamic, automated workflows for forecasting, variance tracking, and budget adjustments—all within the ServiceNow ecosystem.
- Support for Both TBM and FinOps
Proven Optics offers out-of-the-box support for industry-standard TBM models, while also enabling agile, iterative FinOps processes that align with engineering workflows.
Don’t Patch Over the Problem—Replace It
Trying to force-fit FinOps into legacy TBM systems is a short-term fix that introduces long-term friction. Enterprises need a solution that can keep pace with how they actually operate today—cloud-first, data-driven, and decentralized.
Proven Optics doesn’t just enable FinOps. It operationalizes it.
The Takeaway
FinOps isn’t a phase—it’s the future of IT financial management. As cloud adoption accelerates and IT budgets grow more complex, the organizations that win will be the ones that modernize their financial operations now. Proven Optics combines the structure of TBM on ServiceNow with the speed and flexibility of FinOps, delivering a unified platform for modern ITFM.
If your current TBM software can’t keep up, it’s time to move on.
