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AI FinOps Has a Measurement Problem, Not a Price Problem

Organizations spending on AI have told us what's broken, and it isn't the price of a token. In the Tokenomics Foundation's September 2026 State of Tokenomics survey , 43% of 472 respondents named proving value or ROI among their biggest challenges — the most common answer — while only 7% named cost or pricing complexity. When asked what they want from providers, 23% asked for more transparency or granular data and 4% asked for lower prices. That gap is the story of AI FinOps in late 2026. The bill is arriving and growing, and most organizations aren't confident they can connect it to an outcome their CFO would accept. Where AI FinOps stands today AI is no longer a side topic for FinOps teams. By the FinOps Foundation's State of FinOps 2026 count, 98% of respondents now manage AI spend, up from 63% a year earlier and 31% the year before that. AI cost management is now the skill those teams say they need most. One practitioner put the state of the art pla...
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Auto Mode, Zero Retention, Continuous Scanning: What Anthropic's Fall Releases Mean for Security Teams

Anthropic's last two developer releases moved a set of security controls from "ask your account team" to generally available or public beta, and security teams evaluating agentic coding should re-run their assessments against this list. I've been running Claude Code agents across my own projects all year; here is what changed and what I'd look at first. Autonomy is now gated by a classifier, not a human click Auto mode became the default for Claude Code's Pro, Max, and Team plans on August 14, with Enterprise and the cloud platforms to follow. Every tool call passes a classifier tuned for irreversible, destructive, or external actions; blocked actions route to a safer path or a human. Anthropic's published evaluation reports that human reviewers caught 13.6% of dangerous commands while auto mode blocked 89%, and that users approved 97% of the permission prompts they saw. That last number is the one I'd put in front of a risk committee: manual app...
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AVANT and the Trusted Advisor Model: The Other Way to Win the Cloud Marketplace Shift

Deep Dive  ·  AVANT  ·  August 2026 Some Parts of the Channel Were Never Going to Be Self-Service I've watched a lot of distribution models get built, rebuilt, and declared obsolete over thirty-plus years in this business — UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs, the PC clone wars, LANs going Token Ring to Ethernet to WiFi everywhere, on-prem software becoming SaaS. Every one of those transitions produced a wave of people convinced the old way of selling technology was about to disappear entirely, replaced by something faster and more self-service. And every one of those transitions also proved something else out at the same time: for a meaningful slice of buyers, technology decisions are relationship decisions, not catalog decisions. Someone has to sit across the table, understand what the business actually needs, and stay accountable after the contract is signed. That role never went away. It just kept finding a new form. AVANT is ...
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AppDirect's Bet on the B2B Everything Store: What Six Acquisitions Mean for Your Business

Deep Dive  ·  AppDirect  ·  August 2026 Consolidation Is What a Market Looks Like When It's Maturing I've been in technology long enough to have watched this pattern play out more than once. I was working on UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs when the first version of “the internet” was still an internal research network, not a product. I watched the IBM PC clone wars spawn an entire industry — Dell included — out of what looked at the time like commodity chaos. I watched LANs go from Token Ring to Ethernet to the WiFi-everywhere world we now take for granted. I watched on-prem applications become SaaS, and I've spent the years since watching security, backup, and infrastructure follow the same arc. Every one of those transitions had a phase where a handful of companies went on an acquisition run to assemble a full stack faster than they could have built it organically. That phase always looks messy from the outside...
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CloudBlue Changes Hands: Inside HostPapa's Bet on an AI-First Cloud Brokerage Platform

Deep Dive  ·  CloudBlue  ·  August 2026 A White-Label Marketplace Platform Just Changed Owners On August 25, 2025, HostPapa completed its acquisition of CloudBlue from Ingram Micro, folding CloudBlue's commerce, automation, and marketplace technology into HostPapa's existing Hostopia channel-partner division [HostPapa press release, Aug 25, 2025] . If you don't recognize either of those parent-company names, the short version is this: CloudBlue is a white-label platform that lets large resellers, service providers — VARs, MSPs, telcos, distributors, national carriers — run their own branded cloud marketplaces on top of commerce and billing plumbing. For most of the last decade that infrastructure belonged to Ingram Micro, one of the largest technology distributors in the world. Now it belongs to HostPapa, a web-hosting and domain company best known to small businesses, not enterprise telcos. That's a change in scale and ide...
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Virtuozzo in 2026: The Other Half of the Parallels Split Is Engaging the VMware Exodus

Vendor Refresh  ·  Virtuozzo  ·  August 2026 I wrote a post in 2011 pointing hosting and cloud providers at Parallels Automation as the fastest path to a Microsoft Hyper-V cloud service — automated provisioning, subscription billing, control panels, the whole turnkey stack. Every link in that post is dead now, and so is the product line it described. But the company behind it didn't disappear. It split. The Split Nobody Explained at the Time In December 2015, Parallels broke into two separate companies. The automation and billing business — the actual subject of my 2011 post — had already been renamed Odin that March, and Ingram Micro bought it for $163.9 million the same December. Odin became the CloudBlue brand in 2018. If you want that side of the story, including CloudBlue's own recent change of hands, the CloudBlue side of that split has its own recent story worth a separate read. The other half — the ...
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Pax8's Managed Intelligence Launch: Inside the Bet to Own the MSP's AI Layer

Deep Dive  ·  Pax8  ·  August 2026 Pax8 Stopped Calling Itself a Marketplace At Beyond 2026 — Pax8's annual partner conference, held in Salt Lake City June 7-9 — the company launched something it's calling Managed Intelligence. On paper it reads like a features release: a handful of new dashboards, a partner program, an AI-prompting tool. Read closely, it's a repositioning. Pax8 is telling its MSP base that it isn't just the place you buy Microsoft and Google licenses anymore. It wants to be the layer those MSPs build, sell, and govern AI through. That's a meaningfully different company than the one that built its name on marketplace convenience and billing consolidation. Whether it can hold that position is a separate question from what it actually shipped — and the two get conflated in most of the coverage I've read. This post separates them: what's live today, what's still a roadmap slide, and what an MSP evaluatin...
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