The meter readers built themselves a language, then walked across the building and put our name on the door. Stop two on the Grid tour: the standards body, and the eight columns ITAM needs to learn.
The FOCUS release record, provider table, and 1.5 scope are taken from the project's own site and the FinOps Foundation, which has a stake in adoption; the provider table was read on 7 September 2026 and changes quickly. The State of FinOps figures are self-reported survey responses from FinOps practitioners. The Baltimore figures come from NIST's own history (NISTIR 7158). The statement that no publisher has ever delivered an ISO 19770-3 entitlement tag is the host's experience, flagged on air as experience rather than data, and the forecast that FOCUS becomes ITAM's reporting language is flagged as opinion.
The complete transcript — 3,237 words. Search it, quote it, or send the relevant section to a colleague who needs to see it.
Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Operational ITAM Podcast. I'm Bill Van Nort, and today we are visiting the standards body. Two weeks from now, on September twenty-second and twenty-third, a conference opens in Amsterdam under a name most of you have never heard.
Tokenomicon. It is a new Linux Foundation conference for the economics of AI, and from next year FinOps X, the FinOps Foundation's flagship event, becomes a track inside it. And on the front page of that conference's website, under "proudly supported by," there are five logos.
The FinOps Foundation. The Linux Foundation. The new Tokenomics Foundation.
FOCUS. And the ITAM Forum. The page describes itself as bringing together tokenomics, FinOps, and ITAM practitioners.
Read that again. ITAM practitioners. Now back up to June fourth, when the FOCUS Steering Committee ratified version one point four of their billing data specification.
Two new datasets. Forty-seven new columns. And on the Foundation's own list of what practitioners should do next, item one is to go ask your SaaS and on-premises vendors to ship it.
The meter readers built themselves a language. Then they walked across the building to our side, and put our name on the door.
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you're listening from. This is the show where we take the unglamorous machinery of enterprise technology and make it make sense. Grab your coffee.
This is stop two of four on the Grid tour. Last week, in the meter room, we did arithmetic by hand. Dollars divided by units, until the invoice told a story the total could not.
This week we meet the people who wrote that arithmetic into a standard, and it asks for some humility on our side of the house. Back in episode three we built the ledger. Entitlements on the left, normalized deployments on the right, and everything ITAM is came out of reconciling those two columns.
That table has two sides. The invoice was never on it. The bill lived in another system, in another department, in a format the vendor chose.
The FinOps people started from the other end. They started with the bill, the only thing that exists in the cloud, and after years of drowning in vendor formats they finished something our discipline talked about for a decade. They wrote the schema down, and they got the vendors to sign it.
So let me give you the numbers, and I'll name the sources, because on this show, we do that. The FinOps Foundation released its sixth annual State of FinOps survey on February nineteenth, eleven hundred ninety-two respondents, and the headline for us is the scope number, not the AI number. Ninety percent of FinOps teams now manage SaaS spend or plan to, up from sixty-five percent the year before.
Sixty-four percent manage software licensing, up fifteen points. Fifty-seven percent manage private cloud. Forty-eight percent manage the data center.
Sit with that list. Licensing. The data center.
Those are episodes three, seven, and eight of this show. Those are our rooms, and another discipline is now reporting on them to the same executives we report to. Same survey, on FOCUS itself.
Among organizations spending over one hundred million dollars a year, roughly sixty-eight percent already use or experiment with FOCUS-formatted data, and another eighteen percent plan to. And asked where FOCUS should expand next, practitioners said AI workloads, the data center, and SaaS. That is not a cloud billing standard anymore.
It is a technology cost standard with a waiting list, and the waiting list is our estate.
So here is the thesis. A standard is an agreement about what the words mean, made before anybody argues about the numbers. When two rooms work the same estate in different vocabularies, every reconciliation is a negotiation, and the room with the better-defined words wins it every time.
This week, we learn the words.
FOCUS stands for the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, and let me define it before I use it, because we promised that in episode one. It is an open specification for billing data, published under a Creative Commons license as a Linux Foundation project, and it defines the column names, definitions, and rules any technology vendor can use to describe what they charged you. Version one point two, in May of last year, extended it to SaaS and platform billing, added an invoice ID column, and added tokens and credits as a unit of purchase.
Version one point three, last December, added a separate dataset for contract commitments. And one point four, ratified June fourth, added an Invoice Detail dataset, payment terms, due dates, purchase order numbers, so that a consumption record and the physical invoice join on one identifier. That is the reconciliation we did by hand last week, written into the specification as a supported feature.
Now, the columns you actually need. There are sixty-five in the core dataset and you need about eight. Billed Cost, what is on the invoice.
Effective Cost, what it really cost after commitments and prepayments are spread across the usage they covered. List Cost, what it would have been at the public price. Contracted Cost, what your negotiated price says.
Pricing Quantity and Pricing Unit, the meter from last week, with a name. Charge Category, usage, purchase, tax, credit, or adjustment. And Invoice ID.
Last week's effective rate, dollars divided by units, is Effective Cost divided by Pricing Quantity. It has a column now. And List Cost sitting next to Contracted Cost is episode nine's rule, never negotiate against list, written into a schema so the gap between the two is a number and not a feeling.
I apply a handful of tests to any standard before I bet a program on it, and I am deliberately not naming or numbering them. Who writes it. Whether it costs money to read.
Whether you can test a vendor's claim of conformance. And whether it can grow without breaking what you built. FOCUS is written with the billing generators at the table, it is free, it ships a validator and a conformance program, and one point four was published with zero incompatible changes.
Now hold that up against our own standards family, ISO nineteen seven seventy. Part one, the twenty seventeen edition, is a management system standard. It describes your process, not your data, and on its own terms it is fine.
Part two, from twenty fifteen, defines the software identification tag, the SWID tag, and IBM has been shipping them in its software releases since twenty fourteen. Part three, published in April of twenty sixteen, defines an entitlement schema. A machine-readable license.
Publishers were supposed to emit them. My experience, flagged as experience and not as data. In thirty years I have never once received one from a publisher.
Not one. And every part of that family, you pay ISO to read. So here is an opinion, clearly labeled as an opinion.
FOCUS will become the language ITAM reports cost in. Not because it is a better piece of design than part three. Because the people who generate the bills sat at the table and signed it, and in standards, that is the only thing that has ever mattered.
The counter argument is real, and I'll give it to you fairly. FOCUS carries nothing about entitlement. Nothing about installation.
Nothing about the device. The ledger from episode three is not in there and never will be, because a standard for the bill cannot tell you whether you were allowed to consume what you were billed for. Both things are true.
FOCUS is the invoice side of the table. You still own the other two.
Let me show you two real situations, both on the record with the FOCUS project. First. Right now, in the working draft of version one point five, there is a request for worked examples of mapping AI billing into the standard.
The problem statement reads like last week's homework. The columns exist. Practitioners cannot tell how they apply to token billing, so every vendor gets normalized differently.
And the requesters are named. NatWest. SLB.
Shutterstock. AWS. And Anglepoint, a software asset management consultancy.
A SAM firm, inside the FOCUS working group, asking for AI billing examples. Shutterstock's Becky Canterbury, working with more than twenty AI vendors, put it in seven words: "every single one has a different data format." That is the shadow AI census from episode eleven, with a receipt for every vendor and no two receipts alike. Second.
UnitedHealth Group published their FOCUS story with the project. They run three public clouds and an on-premises VMware data center, and the question that kept them up was network cost. They could not compare cloud egress to on-premises networking, because the on-prem data was not granular enough.
So they expressed the data center in FOCUS, and once both sides sat in the same columns, the egress costs everybody feared turned out not to be so alarming. The number was never the problem. The comparability was.
And notice whose estate they expressed. The data center. Ours.
Let's take a quick break. If you're getting value from this show, subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you know somebody who has ever built the same cost report three times for three vendors, send them this episode, because there is a way to build it once.
Every episode with full transcripts is at operationalitam.com. Okay, part two, how ITAM actually speaks FOCUS, and what nobody at the conference will tell you.
Step one, pull the export and ask which version. As of this week the FOCUS project lists seventeen providers with an export, and here is what the table says. AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle ship version one point two.
MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, and Vercel ship one point three. Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, OVH, and Cloudflare ship one point zero. Nobody, as of today, ships one point four.
Which means the Invoice Detail dataset, the headline of the June release, is a standard with no data in it yet. And there are two more columns on that table, conformance gap report and conformance certificate, and this week both are empty for every provider, because the one point four validator is not due until later this quarter. Conformant, right now, means self-declared.
So when a vendor tells you they support FOCUS, your next three words are, which version, and your fourth is, certified. Step two, learn the eight columns and redo last week's homework in them. Dollars over units becomes Effective Cost over Pricing Quantity, and when finance asks, you hand it over without translation.
Step three, express your contract register in the Contract Commitment dataset, and do not wait for the vendor to do it for you. Episode nine's homework had you list every agreement over threshold with renewal, notice, and signature dates. The one point three dataset started with thirteen columns for exactly that, and one point four grew it to thirty.
Start date. End date. Usage-based or spend-based.
Discount percentage. Payment schedule. Those are ITAM's fields.
We have kept them in spreadsheets for twenty years, and now there is a shape for them that finance's tooling already reads. Step four, run it in parallel. STMicroelectronics, fifty thousand employees, runs FinOps with two people, and their published advice is the most practical thing on the site.
They built the FOCUS pipeline alongside the existing one, ran both for a few months until the totals agreed, and only then scheduled the old one for retirement. Your equivalent is one spreadsheet with FOCUS column names beside your existing report, one publisher, one quarter. Step five, and this is the one only ITAM can do.
Put the export in the contract. The Foundation's own guidance says provider participation starts with customer demand, and the customers across the table from software publishers at renewal are us, not FinOps. Remember the eighteen-month clock.
At the nine-month mark, add a data clause to the ask. Billing data delivered in FOCUS format, version stated, at the line item grain. A publisher who refuses to describe your bill in a public schema has told you something about the bill.
And one more thing. Version one point five ratifies December third and gets announced December tenth. Already merged into the working draft: model identity.
Which model was billed, who built it, which family, which version. Already in review: an actor dimension on every cost row, so a charge can name the person, the service, or the agent that drove it. Last week I told you an agent decides the bill.
In the next version of the standard, the agent gets a column. And the honest part. Separating cached tokens from fresh ones, the single lever that cut Coinbase's spend nearly in half last week, is a stretch goal for one point five, not confirmed.
Reasoning tokens, the ones you are billed for and never see, are in the backlog, one point six at the earliest. The standard is chasing the meter, and the meter is still faster.
Which brings us to a listener question, and this one came from Angela in Madison. Angela writes, our cloud FinOps team just told the CFO that all cloud spend is now FOCUS-formatted and reconciled to the invoice. The CFO turned to me and asked why our SaaS and licensing numbers cannot be reconciled the same way.
Do I have an answer? Angela, you have a better one than they do. The cloud team's answer is true and narrow.
True because the big clouds ship the export. Narrow because the SaaS vendors your CFO is actually asking about are mostly not on that table at all. So your answer has three parts.
One. FOCUS carries the bill, not the entitlement, so the SaaS position ITAM produces contains something the cloud reconciliation does not, which is whether the spend was licensed. Two.
You will put your top ten SaaS agreements in the FOCUS commitment dataset yourself, this quarter, from the register you already keep, and run it beside the existing report until they agree. Three. Every renewal from here forward carries a request for FOCUS-formatted billing data, version stated, and you will report back which vendors said yes.
That last one the CFO cannot get from the cloud team, because the cloud team does not hold the renewals. You do. The room that owns the vendor relationship is the room that gets the vendor to speak the language.
That was always going to be us.
Alright. The Grid room. Every grid has a standards body, and the most famous standards story in American infrastructure is not about electricity.
It is about water. On Sunday, February seventh, nineteen oh four, a fire started in the basement of a building in downtown Baltimore. Engine companies came by train from Washington within hours, then from Philadelphia and New York, and many of their hoses did not fit Baltimore's hydrants.
The threads were different. The National Bureau of Standards counted about six hundred variations in hose couplings nationwide, and here is the line from NIST's own history. The differences were part of the design that protected manufacturers from competition.
The fire burned for thirty hours. Fifteen hundred twenty-six buildings. Seventy blocks.
Twelve hundred thirty-one firefighters, many of them standing beside water they could not use. In nineteen oh five the National Fire Protection Association published a standard. Two and a half inches, seven and a half threads to the inch.
Now here is the part the story usually leaves out. By nineteen fourteen, two hundred eighty-seven of eight thousand American cities had adopted it. And in two thousand four, a century after the fire, NIST surveyed the forty-eight largest cities in the country and found eighteen fully on the standard.
Detroit, where I am sitting, was not one of them. Some cities, NIST wrote, changed only after their own major fire. So how did the country cope for a hundred years?
The engines carry adaptors, a box of fittings for every hydrant they might meet. That provider table I read you, one point two here, one point zero there, nothing at one point four, is the nineteen fourteen list. Your vendor's billing format is a thread pitch, and it is a thread pitch for the same reason the hydrant's was.
And the parallel pipeline from step four is the box of adaptors. You do not wait for the city to change its hydrants. You carry the fitting.
Which brings us to today's principle. And let's take the whole run from the top. Hardware Asset Management is a custody discipline.
Software Asset Management is an evidence discipline. Audit defense is a process discipline. Settlement is a commercial discipline.
Shadow IT is a service discipline. Refresh is an economics discipline. Disposal is a liability discipline.
Renewal is a leverage discipline. Tooling is a judgment discipline. The AI estate is a governance discipline.
Consumption is a measurement discipline. And the standard? The standard is a trust discipline.
Back in episode one I told you asset management was never about assets, it was about trust. A standard is what trust looks like when it is written down before the argument. Two rooms, one estate, one definition of the dollar.
Nobody re-derives the number, because nobody has to.
Class dismissed. Here is your homework, and it needs about an hour. Skip the cloud bill, the clouds already did this work.
Pick your largest SaaS or software licensing invoice, last full month, and take the top ten lines. Across the top of a blank sheet, write the eight column names. Billed Cost.
Effective Cost. List Cost. Contracted Cost.
Pricing Quantity. Pricing Unit. Charge Category.
Invoice ID. Fill every cell you can from the invoice and the contract, then count the empty cells by column. Every blank is a fact the vendor decided you did not need.
If Pricing Unit is empty down the whole sheet, that vendor bills you a total with no meter behind it, and that is what you take to the renewal. Date the page. Sign it.
That is your first invoice in the language, and the exact ask for that vendor at the nine-month mark.
Next episode, stop three on the Grid. The rate case. On a real grid, the rate is not set by the market.
It is set in a hearing, with the customers on the other side of the room arguing over what a unit costs. Three publishers have held their own rate cases in the last three years. Broadcom, which ended perpetual licensing for VMware and moved the unit to the core.
Microsoft, which raised the list price of the seat on July first. Oracle, which redefined the Java unit as every employee you have. Next week we put them side by side and ask the rate case question.
When the utility rewrites the unit, what is the customer's side of the room actually allowed to argue, and where has it worked?
And listen, the case files are open. One situation, one page. The constraint you were under, what you did, what happened.
No company names, I will sanitize everything. Send me one worth working at the website, and I will build an episode around it.
I'm Bill Van Nort, this is the Operational ITAM Podcast. Learn the eight columns. Ask which version.
Put the export in the contract. I'll talk to you next week. Take care.
Send it over — anonymized, sanitized, no company names. Real constraints, real politics, real budgets. Situations get worked on air.
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