FinOps vs. RevOps: What's the difference?

Organizations are always looking to streamline budgets and spending while maintaining important business initiatives. FinOps and RevOps are two collaborative processes aimed at improving how businesses manage money.

FinOps and RevOps both involve collaboration between important stakeholders within a company, including finance, IT, sales and service. However, they do serve different purposes as FinOps focuses on how a company can better spend money, while RevOps intends to improve how a business drives revenue.

Learn more about both processes in our video.

Transcript

FinOps or RevOps: Which one is better for your bottom line?

As the pace of business quickens, organizations are constantly looking for new and better ways to handle money. Today, new collaborative processes are appearing that can help optimize spending and drive revenue -- especially in technology-related areas. This has led to the rise of two new terms: FinOps and RevOps.

We'll cover the differences between FinOps and RevOps in this video, but you can read more about another comparison -- FinOps vs. DevOps -- by clicking the link above or in the description below.

FinOps is a combination of the terms finance and operations. It's a broad business initiative designed to optimize the way that a business spends money.

FinOps is based on a collaborative team approach where technology, business, engineering and finance leaders come together as a group to consider business goals and needs. They can then structure spending to implement the required resources and infrastructure.

FinOps is most often discussed in terms of IT and modern cloud computing, emerging as a means of centralizing cloud resources, negotiating best costs for those resources, optimizing the use of those resources for best cloud workload performance and then monitoring the impact on the business.

RevOps, on the other hand, is a combination of the terms revenue and operations. It's another broad business initiative intended to streamline and optimize the way that a business drives revenue, or makes money.

Traditionally, sales, marketing and service departments have existed as isolated business. With RevOps, businesses aim to eliminate these silos by aligning -- though not necessarily combining -- these departments to coordinate efforts, unify revenue tools and share customer information.

A RevOps team uses a variety of metrics to measure revenue performance, such as new customer acquisition, customer retention or churn, and customer satisfaction. A RevOps team will often work with IT to access analytics and AI to watch performance trends and identify new revenue opportunities.

FinOps and RevOps are not mutually exclusive and can exist together within the same organization. The two groups can operate independently, though there's likely to be a single business executive or leader sitting on both teams to coordinate the revenue and spending sides of everyday business operations.

Does your organization have a FinOps or RevOps team? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and be sure to hit that like button.