Azure
There's a quiet revolution happening in FinOps, and most organizations don't realize how much it's about to change their day-to-day operations.
Archera has been committed to FOCUS since Azure shipped 1.0 support at FinOps X 2024. We built FOCUS 1.0 support into our Azure product early — because we recognized from the start that open billing standardization wasn't a trend to wait on. It was the foundation serious rate optimization tooling had to be built on. Today, we're advancing that to full FOCUS 1.2 support. The standard moved. We moved with it.
This isn't just a checkbox on a compliance list. It's a genuine unlock for every customer and partner trying to do serious rate optimization and cost management at scale in the cloud.
Let me explain why this actually matters.
If you manage Azure costs alongside other cloud or SaaS spend, you already know the pain. Microsoft Cost Management exports data in one format. AWS Cost and Usage Reports look completely different. Your Snowflake or Databricks invoices?
A third and fourth schema entirely. Your FinOps team spends entire sprint cycles writing transformation logic and cleaning up CSVs before any useful insights emerge.
This isn't a tooling problem. It's a data standardization problem, and it's been a silent tax on FinOps productivity since the discipline emerged.
The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) is the community's answer. Born inside the FinOps Foundation as an open-source project under the Linux Foundation, FOCUS defines a common schema for billing data across cloud providers, SaaS vendors, and PaaS platforms. The goal: one format, one query language, one mental model — regardless of where your spend originates.
FOCUS version 1.2 was ratified by the FOCUS Steering Committee on May 29, 2025. It represents the most significant leap forward since FOCUS 1.0, and the top four cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — have all committed to supporting the specification. This kind of cross-vendor alignment is rare and impactful.
Version 1.2 isn't just an incremental update. Three capabilities fundamentally change what's possible for FinOps practitioners:
Cloud+ Unified Reporting. Combine SaaS, PaaS, and Cloud billing in one schema — a single dashboard or SQL query covering your full scope of responsibility. If you're managing Azure, AWS, and Snowflake costs today, you know exactly what this eliminates.
Virtual Currency Lifecycle. Track credit and token consumption from AI services and token-based SaaS platforms — confirm commitments match demand, monitor burn-down daily, and avoid surprise overages. As AI spend becomes a first-class FinOps concern, this is no longer optional.
Multi-Currency Normalization.Convert mixed-currency datasets to a single currency for budgeting and P&L analysis, with exchange rates calculable from cost columns in the schema. Finance teams will stop asking why your Azure reports don't match the invoice.
Here's the honest truth about FOCUS adoption: ratifying a specification and actually ingesting, normalizing, and acting on that data in production are two very different things.
Archera's support covers the full ratified specification; the handful of Azure preview columns not yet populated will be ingested automatically as Microsoft completes its rollout. That's the raw material. What Archera delivers is what you do with it.
For our Azure customers and partners, full FOCUS 1.2 support inside Archera means:
Standardized commitment analysis. Azure Reservations and Savings Plans are complex instruments. With FOCUS 1.2 normalized data flowing into Archera, our recommendation engine analyzes commitment coverage, utilization gaps, and optimization opportunities against a consistent schema — no custom parsing, no brittle transformations.
Unified multicloud reporting. Your entire commitment portfolio now speaks the same language inside Archera. Compare coverage rates across clouds, identify optimization opportunities, and report to Finance with a single source of truth.
Faster time to insight. The hours previously spent wrangling billing data are now hours spent optimizing. FOCUS compliance at the data layer is what makes true automation possible at the optimization layer.
Partner and MSP enablement. For MSP and SI partners managing multiple Azure tenants, FOCUS 1.2 means consistent reporting, consistent tooling, and consistent customer conversations — at any scale.
FOCUS isn't just useful for FinOps vendors. It's a community asset that belongs to every practitioner.
The FinOps Foundation has grown from a handful of practitioners in 2019 to over 96,000 today, managing over $2T in technology spend. That community collectively built a specification no single vendor could — or should — own. When you adopt FOCUS 1.2, you're not just improving your reporting. You're voting for an open standard that reduces vendor lock-in and makes the entire FinOps ecosystem more interoperable.
Get involved. Join the FOCUS working group on the FinOps Foundation Slack, pursue the FOCUS Analyst certification, and push your SaaS and PaaS vendors to adopt the specification. The coverage gap closes faster when practitioners demand it.
Archera is a contributing member of the FOCUS working group because we believe the vendors building on this standard have a responsibility to invest in it, not just consume it.
Archera has consistently been ahead of the curve on FOCUS adoption. Anticipating that cloud providers will adopt the standard in production, we built support into our platform. Azure's native FOCUS 1.2 billing exports are currently in Public Preview, with certain fields still being populated. Archera's support is already in place.
We believe a rising tide in data standardization lifts all boats in the optimization layer, and that's ultimately where we deliver value for our customers.
Archera's Azure FOCUS 1.2 support is available now. If you're an existing Archera customer on Azure, you're already covered — Archera manages your cost exports, and FOCUS 1.2 is available to you today without any configuration changes on your end. If you're evaluating how to modernize your Azure FinOps practice, schedule a demo at archera.ai/demo and we'll show you what standardized, actionable rate optimization looks like in production.
The standard is maturing. The data is getting better. The savings are waiting.
I kept thinking “we have heard this cost visibility, cloud tagging and attribution story one too many times.” For me, the game changing moment was when Aran began talking about reducing risk, proactive planning, and creating a secondary marketplace.
