Workshop Results: Hybrid IT - Why ITAM Needs a New Operating Model

FinOps

Workshop Results: Hybrid IT - Why ITAM Needs a New Operating Model

Hybrid IT, a mix of on-prem, public cloud, SaaS and now AI workloads, has become the default for large enterprises, not a temporary phase on the way to “all cloud”. Live polling at the ITAM Review Wisdom Unplugged event in Newbury last month showed that most teams are wrestling with fragmented data, licensing chaos and unclear ownership across suppliers that span on-prem, cloud and SaaS.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the workshop. Thank you to all our sponsors and speakers from the day, and thank you most to Vodafone. In particular, Julia Veall for hosting us and the Vodafone team for looking after us on the day.

Hybrid Complexity in 2025

If you only had one vendor to worry about, let’s say Microsoft, hybrid IT would still be a headache.

Three different portals for cloud, per-user and AI. Three different internal teams. Different commercial models for on-prem licences, cloud subscriptions and AI services. All supposedly “one vendor”.

Now multiply that across your top 10 suppliers. Then add SaaS sprawl, multiple public clouds, and a handful of AI initiatives with their own data and sovereignty constraints.

That’s the day-to-day reality that came through strongly in a hybrid IT workshop I hosted at Wisdom Unplugged in Newbury.

In the room were ITAM practitioners, FinOps leads and IT leaders all trying to answer the same question:

How do we manage cost, risk and value across a messy, hybrid estate that isn’t going away?

This article is for those people: ITAM and FinOps teams living in the grey zone between on-prem, cloud and SaaS. I’ll share why hybrid is here to stay, the challenges practitioners raised, and the controls and collaboration patterns they told us they need.

From Cloud First to Optimised Placement

I think most of us would recognise that most organisations have been through a period of “cloud first” strategy, lifting and shifting, buying into the vision of cloud. Today, I don’t think we’re on a one-way road to all clouds. We’re optimising placement. And this is why I think the FinOps Foundation’s growth into “beyond public cloud” is quite key, because their vision is to say: “I’ve got this workload – where is it best to place it for the business to create the most value? And let’s use an apples-to-apples comparison across public cloud, SaaS, and data centre to decide.” That’s the vision at least – we’ll optimise placement based on what the business needs.

Hybrid as Mainstream

Indicators that Hybrid IT is here to stay:

• The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud report suggests that 70% are using some form of hybrid setup and an average of 2.4 public clouds. Source: 1, 2
• The Nutanix 2025 Enterprise Cloud Index suggests that business drivers like Generative AI, Security and Scaling mean hybrid is the prevailing model of choice. Source
• The Puppet 2025 Cloud Repatriation Trends report suggests organisations are looking at selective repatriation. Public cloud across all the major suppliers is still showing strong year-on-year growth, but we’re also doing repatriation because of cost, privacy and compliance, misconfiguration, performance, vendor lock-in, skills gaps and cloud security. Source

So my underlying message here is that hybrid IT is not a state of limbo to endure whilst we transition, it’s here to stay for the foreseeable.

Licensing and measurement are turning hybrid too

Looking at the top 10 largest software vendors and their flagship products in the enterprise, focusing on how they measure usage and build licence models.

The pattern is clear: Things looking a lot more “cloud-like” even when they are not “pure cloud”.

For example, AI models and the infrastructure needed to deliver AI solutions are typically based on: Tokens and other consumption metrics, Vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow are increasingly combining: User-based entitlements, Consumption-based components alongside Cloud services.

AI is driving hybrid choices

In the workshop, we also touched on AI as a direct driver of hybrid IT.

In many organisations, the data strategy required for AI is now driving the cloud and platform strategy.

For example If an AI application has tight latency requirements or sensitive data, there is often a need for systems and data to be local or in specific locations. That naturally leads to hybrid choices: Some parts in public cloud, Some on-premises or in a sovereign environment. So AI is not something separate from hybrid IT. It is one of the forces pushing us towards it.

Workshop Output – Hybrid IT (Newbury, November 2025)

Our first discussion topic of the workshop was focussed on the challenges of Hybrid IT.

What came through strongly in the workshop, is that the real pain isn’t technical, it’s organisational. As mentioned earlier, one strategic supplier can easily show up as three different worlds: a cloud portal for infrastructure consumption, a user and identity portal for per-user licensing, and an AI/new services plane with its own controls and metrics. Each has different data, different internal owners and different commercial models.

Scale that pattern across your top ten suppliers and you get exactly what people described in Newbury: no single source of truth for hybrid IT; “licensing chaos” as on-prem, cloud and SaaS models collide; and no clear visibility of who actually owns the supplier end-to-end.

Add in a market that’s quietly shifting from “are we using it?” to “can we afford it and justify it?” and you’ve got a perfect storm: fragmented data, fuzzy ownership and rising contract and lock-in risk, all wrapped up in a story that’s meant to be about agility and innovation.

Q. For suppliers that span on-premise, cloud and Saas – what are your biggest challenges?

1. Fragmented data & lack of a single view – no coherent, trusted picture across on-prem, cloud and SaaS.
2. Licensing, usage rights & commercial complexity across models
3. How to turn Hybrid usage into controlled spend and value
4. No clear operating model, process and skills breaks, many orgs are not structured to manage a single supplier across on-prem, cloud and SaaS.
5. Governance, risk and third party constraints – being boxed in by contracts, dependencies and vendor/partner behaviour. Audit risk, compliance with T&Cs across environments, partner-managed workloads, and “we can’t change this because of the contract / MSP / outsourcer”.

Q. Is there a single leader overseeing both ITAM and FinOps?

The response, via Slido at Newbury, broadly echoed what I saw when I asked the same question of a FinOps audience in Amsterdam (These are anecdotal results, not a scientific survey).

Given how new FinOps is in the grand scheme of IT management (30 years), the level of visibility and uptake already is striking. The tide is pulling the market towards closer alignment, even if formal reporting lines haven’t caught up.

How can we work better to manage Hybrid IT?

We asked of the workshop: “what processes and controls should we put in place?”. The answers the group gave were refreshingly simple and people-centred.

Q. What controls or processes can we put in place to address these challenges? What are the hand-offs or points of collaboration with FinOps?

1. Governance, roles & guardrails – Who is accountable for what, and what are the non-negotiable rules?
2. Leadership sponsorship & shared vision
3. Communication, collaboration & culture – Regular, structured interaction between teams with a common language.
4. Shared data, tools & “single source of truth” – Everyone looking at the same numbers.
5. Processes & lifecycle hand-offs (especially for Hybrid / BYOL) Where exactly ITAM and FinOps “touch” the work.

Finally, I asked what ITAM Forum and FinOps Foundation, as both community-led initiatives, can do to help:

What can the ITAM Forum & FinOps Foundation do to help?

1. Executive narrative & internal advocacy – Help us get Hybrid IT / ITAM / FinOps taken seriously at C-level.
2. Shared language, culture & operating model (ITAM + FinOps as one team) Culture change work: from tool-centric / licence-centric to a joined-up hybrid IT value culture.
3. Capability building, education & awareness – Give us ways to skill up and grow this capability across the enterprise.
4. Practical hybrid IT implementation guidance & technical patterns – Show us exactly how to do this in messy, real hybrid environments.”

A key point here is that the market is already moving in terms of ITAM and FinOps coming together. This is not news. What the community is asking for is help in showing what “good” looks like and the art of the possible when the two teams really do work as one.

What Next?

A simple next step is to run the same two core questions above (challenges and controls) inside your own organisation: ask your ITAM, FinOps and cloud teams what their biggest hybrid IT challenges are, and what processes or controls they think would help, then compare your themes with those from Newbury and feed them into the ongoing work we’re doing with the FinOps Foundation.

Wrap up

The Newbury workshop confirmed what many already suspected:

• Hybrid IT is not going away
• AI is reinforcing hybrid rather than replacing it
• Our vendor relationships and licence models are becoming more hybrid too
• Practitioners are wrestling with a lack of single sources of truth, licensing chaos, unclear ownership and contract risk across hybrid estates

Thanks again to everyone who contributed towards the workshop. We look forward to working closely with the FinOps Foundation to tackle these hybrid IT challenges together and to turn the recommendations surfaced in the Newbury workshop into practical, shared guidance for the whole community.

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