de Mora, technology economics

Speaking

Conference keynotes, panels, and corporate briefings.

I have delivered FinOps keynotes, panels, and corporate briefings for the FinOps Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Trustmarque, CloudKeeper, Apptio, and others since 2022. I wrote the FinOps Foundation Maturity Assessment methodology and co-created the FinOps Certified Professional certification.

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Talks are built around a thesis, drawn from experience, and pitched at audiences who already know what FinOps is. A practitioner’s perspective, for programme committees and L&D teams that want meat on the bones rather than vendor-flavoured filler.

Current talk topics

Cloud unit economics, unit revenue, unit variance: or, why cost is irrelevant

Most FinOps practices spend their first two years arguing about cost. The mature ones eventually work out that cost is the wrong frame entirely. What actually matters is the unit economics underneath: cost per transaction, per customer, per service hour, and the variance in those numbers as load and architecture shift. This talk argues for replacing the cost conversation with a unit-economics one, shows what that looks like in practice, and makes the case that the FinOps teams who get there first end up doing very different work from the ones who don’t.

Transforming culture: getting people engaged around FinOps

FinOps fails on culture more often than it fails on tooling. A talk about the people side of the practice: how to get engineering teams to care about spend without weaponising it, how to bring finance into engineering conversations without anyone losing face, and the small organisational moves that quietly determine whether a FinOps practice grows roots or just stays a dashboard.

What is this “savings” thing you speak of? Savings against waste

The FinOps industry uses the word “savings” loosely, often to flatter dashboards and budgets that didn’t actually change. This talk separates two things people routinely conflate: cutting waste, which is genuine and almost always worth doing, and “saving” against an imaginary baseline, which is often illusory and sometimes counterproductive. Getting the distinction right reshapes how you measure your own programme, and changes the conversation you have with your CFO.

Past engagements

Recent recordings: podcasts, panels, and keynotes.

Bio for organisers

Short, about 60 words

Ben de Mora is an independent FinOps advisor and educator based in Glasgow. He wrote the FinOps Foundation’s Maturity Assessment methodology, used by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, or by derivatives of it, to evaluate customer FinOps practice. He co-created the FinOps Certified Professional certification, has taught more than 3,000 practitioners since 2019, and has contributed to USD 100m in cumulative cloud spend avoidance.

Standard, about 110 words

Ben de Mora is an independent FinOps advisor, educator, and writer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Before going independent, he spent two decades in engineering and infrastructure leadership at organisations including Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Cloudreach, Sky, Rackspace, the FinOps Foundation, Apptio, IBM Consulting, and GitLab. He wrote the FinOps Foundation’s Maturity Assessment methodology, used by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, or by derivatives of it, to evaluate customer FinOps practice, and co-created the FinOps Certified Professional certification. He has taught the FinOps Certified Practitioner course to more than 3,000 practitioners since 2019 at a sustained 95 per cent exam pass rate, and has contributed to USD 100m in cumulative cloud spend avoidance.

Programme committees and L&D teams: tell me the audience, the slot length, and what you want them arguing about on the way out. I’ll tell you straight if I am the wrong person for it.

Book me to speak