Optimizing for Value: FinOps at Cummins

Cummins' Hemraj Yadav (Lead, Cloud and FinOps) and IBM's Kevin Smith (Global Field CTO for Turbonomic and FinOps) tackle the FinOps execution gap: the industry has solved visibility with endless dashboards, but knowing where the waste is doesn't close it. Hemraj shows how a 107-year-old global power leader built FinOps as a shared discipline across defined personas, then moved from manual, backlog-bound optimization to continuous execution at scale by integrating IBM Turbonomic recommendations directly into ServiceNow so application teams own their own maintenance windows. Kevin frames the maturity path from visibility to trusted recommendations to policy-guided, scaled automation, and the results are concrete: roughly 800,000 optimization actions across cloud and on-premises in a year (including a 13,000-action bulk execution in a single day) and a 52% effective savings rate sustained over five-plus years. 00:00 Intro: FinOps Personas and Shared Accountability at Cummins 07:00 The FinOps Execution Gap: Data Everywhere, Action Nowhere 13:39 The Maturity Curve: Visibility, Recommendations, Continuous Execution 18:27 Building Trust: Controlled Rollout, Guardrails, and Performance-Based Recommendations 25:09 The Three Modes and Optimization as an Operating Model 32:44 Audience Q&A Watch the Day 1 Keynote and Tokenomics Foundation announcement: https://www.youtube.com/live/W4g8xvduIbs Watch the Day 2 Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/vyQTW0PLw7A Learn more about Token Economics: https://tokeneconomics.com https://x.finops.org https://join.finops.org #FinOps #FinOpsX #CloudOptimization #Turbonomic #Automation