Flexera’s 2026 State of ITAM Report puts a number on something most of us have felt for a while: 97% of ITAM professionals now carry some level of FinOps responsibility, and 78% of organisations have a dedicated FinOps team — up again year-on-year.

On paper, that looks like alignment. In practice, the report tells a different story: While collaboration between the two functions declined year-on-year on average, their responsibilities overlap more than ever. Two teams are being pulled into the same conversation — cost, risk, control — without a shared operating model to run it through.

From Flexera’s perspective, the challenge isn’t getting ITAM and FinOps teams to collaborate. The data suggests they already are: across organisations of all sizes, all report some interaction between the two functions. The bigger challenge facing businesses is defining ownership.

As SaaS, cloud and AI spending converge, responsibilities increasingly overlap. Who owns SaaS optimisation? Who owns public cloud licensing? Who owns AI software governance? In many organisations, the answer is “both.” That’s where friction emerges. Collaboration without clear accountability can create duplicate effort, inconsistent decision-making and competing priorities. The organisations seeing the greatest success are not necessarily those with the most interaction between ITAM and FinOps, but those with clearly defined decision rights, shared metrics and a common operating model for managing technology spend and risk.

That gap is exactly where we’ve built our FY27 approach with Flexera.

Visibility → Control → Optimisation

Rather than treating ITAM, cloud cost and AI spend as three separate conversations, we work them as one continuous line — because that’s how the risk actually shows up for our customers:

  • Technology Intelligence — a trusted, single source of data across EoL/EoS exposure, vulnerabilities and app rationalisation, so decisions start from confidence, not guesswork
  • Cloud Cost Optimisation — turning that visibility into governed action: waste, rightsizing, commitments, realised savings
  • AI Cost Management — the newest and fastest-moving front. The report found only 31% of organisations have visibility into AI software spend, while 59% say AI waste has increased year-over-year. Investment is accelerating; governance isn’t keeping pace.

Two other numbers from the report reinforce why this matters now, not eventually: complete IT asset visibility has fallen to 36%, and 48% of organisations were audited last year — with 44% spending over £1M on audits across the past three years. Visibility, cost and risk aren’t three separate problems. They’re one problem showing up in three places.

Why this is a partnership conversation…

Flexera provides the intelligence. Our role is turning that intelligence into action — advisory-led, stakeholder-first, and built around where ITAM and FinOps genuinely need to operate as one function rather than two teams comparing dashboards.

If your organisation recognises this gap — teams with overlapping responsibility but no shared model to act on it — that’s the conversation worth having.