TD Synnex Takes Aim At AI’s Surprise Bills With New FinOps Fusion Offering

‘I believe [partners are] going to be able to turn this into a managed practice, which many have done with traditional FinOps. But now, as we fuse together on-premises, the cloud and AI, I believe it becomes a lot more meaningful. So there’s a lot of different ways for our partners to monetize this,’ says Francisco Criado, TD Synnex’s North America senior vice president for cloud, security and AI.


IT distribution leader TD Synnex Thursday opened its TD Synnex 2026 Inspire conference with the unveiling of FinOps Fusion, a new offering designed to help its channel partners manage the cost of AI consumption.

FinOps Fusion is aimed at improving solution providers’ visibility into their end customers’ AI token usage to help them more easily identify inefficiencies, optimize spending and improve governance for scalable and sustainable AI deployments.

The new offering comes as the push to migrate new applications to the cloud came with uncomfortable conversations when the bills started coming in, said Francisco Criado, North America senior vice president for cloud, security and AI at TD Synnex.

[Related: TD Synnex CEO: Distribution Momentum Broadens As Hyve, AI And Market Share Gains Drive Growth]

“Cost sprawled, and nobody owned the bill,” Criado (pictured) told CRN. “And that’s where we had to create this whole discipline, FinOps, to get this under control so we could go from having all these surprises to where businesses could really see and manage their environments.”

Criado said FinOps has three main components:

AI is just accelerating the challenge, Criado said.

“Most AI FinOps platforms stop at the public cloud, but the challenge is that the workloads don’t stop there,” he said. “They’re running on rented and owned infrastructure. There’s applications, models, agents, hardware, all that stuff. We’ve been working with our customers with our very mature FinOps practice here at TD Synnex, especially in North America. We know that if you can’t see the whole estate, you can’t govern it, so that’s where we came up with this idea.”

FinOps Fusion is a new practice from TD Synnex that brings together the management of both public cloud and core infrastructure environments, Criado said.

“We’ve created one practice with one view, FinOps Fusion,” he said. “It sees the entire state where the money goes between core and cloud. And it’s interesting because it optimizes both worlds because most customers have on-premises and cloud environments. But it also gives them a lot of visibility, such as are applications and workloads sitting in the right place. There might be some repatriation from the cloud back to the data center, or a move from the data center to the cloud. And from talking to partners and looking at cloud and AI and how they are accelerating the challenge, I truly believe the winners in cloud and AI are going to be those who help their customers generate the most business value from every dollar spent on their infrastructure.”

FinOps Fusion is based in part on TD Synnex’s own operations, Criado said.

“We’re optimizing both environments, but it’s never done together,” he said. “It wasn’t done in the past. And what’s really changing here is that you get that single view of the data center core on-premises infrastructure in the cloud. We’ll also have token-level optimization coming out a little bit later this year. We actually have the production and consumption of tokens to go along with it. So that’s why we’re really excited about it. This will create more stickiness with our partners’ customers.”

Partners will be able to use FinOps Fusion to do customer assessments to provide optimization recommendations, but the primary goal is to create a recurring revenue stream, Criado said.

“I believe they’re going to be able to turn this into a managed practice, which many have done with traditional FinOps,” he said. “But now, as we fuse together on-premises, the cloud and AI, I believe it becomes a lot more meaningful. So there’s a lot of different ways for our partners to monetize this.”

TD Synnex FinOps Fusion is now available for partners, Criaso said. The only part not ready for the initial release is the AI token production and consumption visibility part, but he said it is in beta and is expected to be in general availability before the end of 2026.

As an AWS advanced tier services partner, Deep Blue Cloud Computing is an AWS reseller working with TD Synnex to help build cloud-based solutions, said Benjamin Tosado, founder of the Key Largo, Fla.-based solution provider.

“As an AWS reseller, customers get their AWS bills from us,” Tosado told CRN. “Part of what our customers usually look for as they start to grow their AWS footprint is how they can do it as cost-effectively as possible. Since we’re the reseller for many of these customers, they look to us and say, ‘We’re going to end up spending more. We know that we’re going to end up doing more stuff. How can we do it as efficiently as possible?’ So it is a necessary part of our offering.”

Prior to the release of TD Synnex FinOps Fusion, Deep Blue Cloud Computing worked with multiple ISVs with their individual FinOps offerings along with its own manual processing and had its engineering teams look at customer environments and make various cost optimization and financial FinOps recommendations, Tosado said.

“With FinOps Fusion, I don’t have to worry about any of that anymore,” he said. “I don’t have to build a service. Honestly, we don’t make a ton of money on FinOps. We make a little bit on it, but customers expect it. When we’re developing service offerings, ideally we want to be developing service offerings and running service offerings in-house that move the needle for our business and for our customers.”

FinOps is important, but essentially it needs to just work and let customers verify their cost savings and efficiency, Tosado said.

“We’d much rather hand it off to a partner,” he said. “TD Synnex is also our resale distributor, so this works very well. They already have all the data for what customers are spending on the AWS services we provide, how they’re spending it, etc., because customers’ utilization is going through the distributor. So it’s very easy just to sign up and say, ‘Hey guys, you manage it. You put it all together. We don’t care what tools you’re using. You send us the reports.’ We can just outsource that whole piece to TD Synnex and include it from a customer-facing perspective in our overall managed services portfolio, which includes a variety of other things where we really move the needle for our business in a more substantial way.”