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Michael Flanakin

Michael Flanakin

Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

Latest posts

Showing 1 – 10 of 54 posts found

Democratizing FinOps: Transform your practice with FOCUS and Microsoft Fabric 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

With new developments like Copilot in Microsoft Cost Management and Microsoft Fabric, there couldn’t be a better time to take a fresh look at how you manage cost within your organization and how you can leverage the FinOps Framework and the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) to accelerate your FinOps efforts.

graphical user interface, application, Teams

Published • 6 min read

FOCUS: A new specification for cloud cost transparency 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

Get ready for FOCUS, a new open specification for cloud billing data that’s redefining how you manage and optimize cloud costs. Learn about the new “language” of FinOps, why it’s important, and how you can get started today with resources from the Microsoft FinOps toolkit.

a person sitting at a table in front of a laptop

Published • 8 min read

How Microsoft Cloud is embracing FinOps practitioners 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

Learn how Microsoft is embracing FinOps practitioners and enabling organizations to drive business value through FinOps education, faster analytics, a new FinOps toolkit open source project, and improvements to help you identify and monitor your cost saving opportunities.

Published • 8 min read

Microsoft Cost Management updates—May 2023 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

May is all about cost optimization! From customizable right-sizing recommendations in Advisor to many updates to pricing experiences and the addition of cost recommendations in Azure Resource Graph for Azure Gov and Azure China clouds. Throw in 3 updated previews in Cost analysis, 6 new/updated ways to save, and a bunch of videos and docs and you’ve got a lot of catching up to do! Enjoy!

Published • 8 min read

Microsoft Cost Management updates—January 2023 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

January is always exciting, and this year is no different with the general availability of EA account management for indirect customers, recent and pinned views in the Cost analysis preview, 3 new preview features, 7 new ways to save, 1 video, and 6 doc updates.

Published • 11 min read

Microsoft Cost Management 2022 year in review 

By Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Cost Management

In some ways, 2022 is what we expected out of 2021. Perhaps it’s better late than never, but the world is beginning to get back to normal—albeit a new normal where hybrid work is a default rather than an exception for many of us. In this new world, demands on our time have increased exponentially, making it more critical than ever to focus on maximizing value, return on investment, and cloud efficiencies. And that’s exactly what you saw as we doubled down on savings opportunities in 2022.