CerteroX was announced in San Diego as one platform bringing cloud cost management and SaaS optimisation together. Here is what was said at the show, and what the platform actually ships today.
San Diego, June 2025 — Certero attended FinOps X, the industry event for cloud financial management, to unveil CerteroX: a single platform built to bring enterprise cost control across SaaS and multi-cloud into one place.
Certero has been building ITAM and SAM since 2007. At FinOps X the company introduced CerteroX — cloud cost management and SaaS optimisation on a shared platform, built for the Cloud+ era of FinOps rather than retrofitted into it.
The argument for unifying them is simple. IT, finance and procurement each hold part of the cost picture and none of them holds all of it. When SaaS spend lives in one tool and cloud spend in another, the reconciliation work is where the month goes, and nobody ends up accountable for the total.
As FinOps practice matures, the market is not asking for more disconnected tools. It is asking for fewer tools that agree with each other.
CerteroX was designed against the FinOps Foundation’s framework so that adopting the practice does not mean building the tooling yourself. That alignment is formal rather than rhetorical:
The practical scope covers multi-cloud cost visibility and optimisation, SaaS licence utilisation and spend control, real-time analytics and automation, and the cross-functional reporting that lets IT, finance and procurement argue from the same numbers.
FinOps X 2025 marked a turning point with the release of four new FinOps for Datacenter Scope papers. These extend FinOps principles past public cloud into on-premises and hybrid environments — the area where Certero has the longest history, because that is where the company started.
Certero contributed to that work. It matters for a specific reason: most organisations do not run cloud-only, and a cost discipline that stops at the data centre door leaves the licensing, hardware lifecycle and workload-placement decisions that shape the cloud bill entirely outside the frame.
The announcement in San Diego described two capabilities on one platform. That description has been overtaken. CerteroX is now five products on one data model: CerteroX ITAM, CerteroX SAM, CerteroX SaaS Management, CerteroX Cloud Management and CerteroX AI Management. One schema, one set of owners, one cost position.
On the cloud side, the optimisation engine runs 26 named, individually tunable checks across 12 cloud and data platforms — abandoned instances, images, load balancers, S3 buckets and Kinesis streams; obsolete images, IPs, snapshots and snapshot chains; instances stopped but not deallocated; instance rightsizing; reserved instance and savings plan purchase opportunities; Kubernetes rightsizing. Each check carries its own thresholds, pool exclusions and account skips, so the engine fits your environment instead of nagging about it. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%.
On the SaaS side, 47 connectors ship today, pulling authoritative user and licence lists straight from the vendor. Those combine with identity provider sync and a browser extension to give three converging discovery signals, resolved against an application catalogue of 35,000+ applications. Unused licences are detected at 30 or more days of zero usage, and reclamation, reassignment, tier downgrade and bulk deprovisioning are actions in the product rather than tickets in someone else’s queue.
Governance sits alongside both: expense anomaly detection against a rolling daily average, expiring and recurring budget policies, tag compliance rules, resource TTL with automatic lifecycle enforcement, and a violation history you can hand to audit.
Managing cloud and SaaS cost should be a routine discipline, not a quarterly archaeology project. CerteroX is built to move teams past reactive spend tracking and toward FinOps maturity — whether you are standing the practice up for the first time or scaling it across the whole organisation.
Book a demo, or read more about CerteroX Cloud Management.
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Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.