Most FinOps stories begin with engineers or finance professionals who fell into cloud cost management. Rense Siegmund's started in a gym. A PE teacher by training, he spent years running corporate workshops on collaboration, communication, and leadership. When someone asked if he could deliver a FinOps training, his answer was direct: "I can deliver a training, but I don't know what FinOps is yet."
Four years later, that honesty became an advantage. Rense co-founded the FinOps Academy, a Netherlands-based firm built on one belief: teach organizations to run their own FinOps, not depend on someone who runs it for them. Outside of work, he runs ultra-distance trail races through the Alps. Races of 100 to 120 kilometres, through the night, with nothing but a headlamp. In trail running, he learned what sprinters never discover: skip nutrition in the first hour and you collapse in the sixth. Skip data discipline early in a FinOps practice and trust collapses later.
That parallel runs through everything Rense builds. FinOps is not a sprint to optimization. It is a long strategic race where early discipline determines whether you reach the finish line at all.
Teaching Them to Fish: Why Self-Sufficiency Beats Long-Term Dependency
The FinOps consulting market runs on a familiar cycle: hire experts, let them optimize, renew the contract. Rense operates on the opposite premise. He and his three co-founders train practitioners to handle their own FinOps, then step back. In just over a year, they have built a client roster spanning government agencies, banks, insurance companies, and utilities across Western Europe and the UK.
Q: You describe your philosophy as "teaching people to fish." In practice, what does that look like when an organization first comes to you?
We're very strong believers that in the basics, FinOps is not rocket science. But doing it in a disciplined, structured way, keeping the wheel moving, that's the hard part. There are a lot of tools that can find opportunities to reduce waste or shift left. All that data is available. The real question is: how do you get organizations to act on those recommendations? So we help organizations that are just starting out. Maybe they have one or two new practitioners. We coach them step by step, sometimes through training, sometimes through hands-on coaching, until they can run FinOps themselves without being reliant on a consultant doing the work for them.
Q: You're also doing hands-on practitioner work at a national utilities company. How does working both sides change what you teach?
I'm getting my hands dirty in real life, and that makes it much easier to deliver training. I bring in ideas from other organizations, and they benefit from everything I've learned coaching elsewhere. It's a win-win in both directions. We also get asked by more mature organizations to challenge their existing practice. A large financial institution recently told us they do FinOps for cloud, but cloud is only 20% of their total IT spend. The other 80% is still on-prem. They want to expand the scope, but leadership is setting cost-reduction KPIs that don't match three-year on-prem contracts. Those are harder questions, and sometimes it helps to have someone from outside the organization asking them.
Serving the Whole Curve: What Gets Lost When the Community Talks Only to the Top
FinOps X Day in London, held just days before this conversation, drew a vibrant crowd. The Western European community showed up in force. But Rense sees a gap between the energy at these events and the reality facing most organizations entering the FinOps space for the first time. The community's centre of gravity has drifted toward the advanced end, leaving newcomers to find their own way in.
Q: Is there equal support across the full FinOps maturity spectrum, or does most of what's available cater to the advanced end?
If you go to the FinOps Foundation website, there is a lot of information on how to get started. But if you come to FinOps X, or go to a meetup, it's often catered for the new things. How do we do AI in the best way? Or some enormous Databricks cluster that calculates everything. That's certainly interesting, but it can be really overwhelming if you're just starting. I think the community has to do some work inviting newbies in. On the other hand, we're probably all newbies, because FinOps is not that old.
Q: In The Netherlands, roughly 60% of total cloud spend comes from organizations spending less than three million a year. Very few tool vendors are chasing that segment. What does FinOps look like for them?
If you use Azure and you use Cost Management, you get some information. But you need to know your way around. If you don't, the recommendations are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and you don't have the knowledge to recalculate or fit them into your own context. What we do in training is work with real-life examples. I have people look into their AWS or Azure account and ask, have you looked at the cost monitor? What does it say? I see dev-test environments running at night. Shutting them down is something everybody can find without too much trouble if you show them where to look. You can start FinOps with a minimal amount of data and a minimal amount of knowledge. Then take it step by step, kilometre by kilometre.
Outgrowing the Toolbox: When Mature Teams Stop Buying and Start Building
Ten years ago, there were three FinOps tools on the market. Today, the landscape shifts between conversations. Acquisitions, new entrants, and feature overlap make vendor selection a discipline in itself. Rense helps organizations navigate the plethora, but he also sees a pattern emerging on the other side: organizations that eventually decide they no longer need any of it.
Q: How do you help organizations make sense of a tool market that moves this fast?
We try to help organizations pick the tool that fits them. A big part of that is first analysing what they actually need. Once you have a list of requirements, picking a tool becomes much easier, because probably half of them you can just scratch. They're not going to deliver the value you need. Cost is also a factor. Insights you can get cheaply. If you want shift-left capabilities straight away, it will be more expensive. So depending on your needs, you pick the tool that gives you a proper ROI.
Q: Do you see organizations outgrowing third-party tools altogether?
We see bigger organizations that made that choice pretty quickly, because they knew they'd have a really big spend. Others start with cloud-native tooling, then add a third-party platform on top, and after a while they think: is this still delivering the value I need? Or it becomes too expensive for what they get. Then they start building their own. I see this already in Western Europe. One large organization developed their own FinOps tool, and because the leadership teams all know each other, they open-sourced it for their peers. They copied the investment and took out the third-party provider entirely.
Q: Is moving away from vendor tooling a sign of FinOps maturity?
I don't think so. It depends on the relationship you have with the provider. If you can really partner well, you benefit from their knowledge, their expertise, their insights from other organizations. If the partnership is good, the tool will evolve and deliver what you need. For cloud providers, it's different. There's a conflict of interest, because they would love you to spend as much as possible. The insights they give you need to be checked by an unbiased party.
The Trail Ahead: AI, Agents, and the Changing Role of the Practitioner
Every FinOps event in 2026 has been dominated by the same question: what does AI change? London's FinOps X Day was no exception. Rense's answer starts with what might be the most grounding perspective in the room: not much, and everything.
Q: Is AI fundamentally changing FinOps, or is this another turn of the same cycle?
In my opinion, AI is not really changing that much for FinOps. We're getting a new layer on top of it, but the principles stay the same. Compare now to ten or fifteen years ago when everybody was moving to the cloud for the first time. Same excitement, same uncertainty. We need time to figure out governance, compliance, control. That's the pattern every time something new enters IT. On the other hand, a lot of the manual analytical work will be done by AI very quickly. That means the practitioner's role shifts from data-insights provider to change consultant, a more strategic role. What concerns me is the entry path. Junior-level FinOps jobs will be done by AI. So where do you build experience? If you're 25 and you have to convince strategic leadership, good luck. Who's going to listen to you?
Q: Can anyone actually prove a clear ROI on AI investments today?
I've seen some really bad and really good examples, but they're probably all still in proof-of-value territory. Implementing Copilot at one organization, we could measure that development time decreased and we could measure the cost. Engineering hours went down, Copilot cost went up, so we could make a fair comparison and assume a positive ROI. But if you fine-grain that to individual engineers, some are far more effective and some burn a lot of tokens with no speed improvement. If you don't have your business goals clear, measuring value becomes very hard. A lot of AI initiatives start with "we have to do something with AI" and no clear goal. That makes ROI almost impossible.
Silicon Valley Behind the Dykes: Can Europe Build Its Own Tech Future?
The conversation about FinOps maturity, self-sufficiency, and the instinct to build rather than buy points to a broader question about where European tech sits on the global stage. Rense, working across Western Europe, has a view.
Q: Europe gets framed as a regulatory power, not a tech power. What's the counter-narrative?
Look at ASML. They make state-of-the-art machines that produce chips, and they have expert knowledge that's almost impossible to copy. When I visit them, there's an atmosphere of wanting to innovate, wanting to be the best. That's really in the culture of the organization. The Netherlands is after the US the second-biggest exporter of agricultural goods, and we're a tiny country. That's all because of innovative products, high-quality seeds, technology to run farms more efficiently. We should be able to do this in tech as well. In France, you have Mistral. The EU is setting up AI factories across Europe. There are initiatives. But in Europe, we always have to negotiate between countries. It takes more time. On the other hand, we have 500 million people and a highly educated population. That's bigger than the US. Europe should maybe shake off the "we're small and you're big" mindset and pick up the gloves.
Q: Does the current geopolitical climate accelerate that shift?
I think the urgency is helping. You have to be more energy self-sufficient, produce closer to home, stop relying on everything shipped in from elsewhere. Collaboration between different parts of the world is getting less, not more. Nobody wants that, but it's happening. That urgency will help Europe get into action quicker than before.
Key Takeaways
Rense Siegmund's perspective reframes FinOps maturity as an endurance discipline, not a technology race, with these essential insights:
Discipline Over Complexity. FinOps is not rocket science. The basics have been known for decades. What separates successful practices from stalled ones is the discipline to keep the wheel moving, not the sophistication of the tools.
Self-Sufficiency as the Goal. Training organizations to run their own FinOps is more valuable than embedding consultants who do the work for them. The "teach them to fish" model builds lasting capability, not lasting dependency.
The Underserved Majority. Roughly 60% of cloud spend in The Netherlands comes from organizations too small for most vendors to serve. These organizations need practical, low-barrier starting points, not enterprise platforms.
Build Culture Over Buy Comfort. European organizations instinctively calculate long-term value over short-term convenience. That instinct drives mature teams toward homegrown FinOps tooling and away from third-party platforms.
AI Changes the Role, Not the Rules. AI will automate the analytical layer of FinOps, but the principles remain. The harder question is how junior practitioners build experience when entry-level work disappears.
Start Before You're Ready. The biggest anti-pattern in FinOps is waiting for perfect data, perfect tools, or perfect frameworks before taking the first step. Start with what you have and improve kilometre by kilometre.
The Bottom Line
FinOps maturity is not measured by the tools an organization buys. It is measured by the discipline it builds. As AI absorbs routine analysis and the tool market consolidates, the organizations that invested in practitioner capability rather than platform dependency will be the ones still running when others have stopped.
About Rense Siegmund
Rense Siegmund is a co-founder of the FinOps Academy, a Netherlands-based training and coaching firm that helps organizations across Western Europe and the UK build self-sufficient FinOps practices. A certified FinOps practitioner and FinOps Foundation trainer, Rense combines hands-on practitioner work at major European enterprises with training programmes designed to make organizations independent. Connect with Rense on LinkedIn.
The perspectives expressed reflect the interviewee's personal experience and views. Cloud Value Lab publishes practitioner-led thought leadership at the intersection of FinOps, GreenOps, and AI Economics.