In collaboration with Flexera, IBM extends its AI-powered automation strategy to help enterprises simplify IT asset management across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
IBM announced new solutions with IT management software company, Flexera and IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management (ARM) to help organisations use automation to streamline IT asset management. The new solutions are aimed at assisting businesses to lower costs and automate the increasingly complex tasks of software license compliance and optimisation.
IT business leaders have reported that IT asset management has become a complex, expensive and time-intensive task for enterprises as they adopt a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy with software and applications running across public, private and on-premises environments.
A Flexera Study found that 34 per cent of a typical IT spend budget is on software and SaaS applications. Yet, nearly half of respondents cited the need to focus on better managing these products and improving the reclamation of underused or unused products. Because of this, enterprises can face significant cost penalties if licenses are non-compliant or if they are over-or under-utilising resources.
The challenge is exacerbated by the gap in skills that many enterprises are facing. According to Gartner, IT executives responding cited talent availability as the primary adoption risk factor for most IT automation technologies (75 per cent). Businesses need IT expertise to manage automation technologies.
To help organisations overcome these challenges, IBM and Flexera have developed integrations with Turbonomic ARM and Flexera One to help visualise their IT estate from on-premises to SaaS to cloud. Businesses can then automate the manual tasks of software license and resource optimisation. Turbonomic ARM is designed to continuously monitor and help improve application performance and governance by dynamically resourcing applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to reduce costs. Turbonomic ARM combined with software license data, utilisation data and insights from Flexera One is designed to help businesses mitigate the risk of penalties from software non-compliance to minimise surprise billings. The integrated solution also helps identify areas of underutilisation so that enterprises can find ways to balance overall costs and help ensure their resources are being optimised for performance.
“IT professionals have what a simple mandate to maintain and improve IT operations is. But in the face of labour shortages, geographic disruptions, security threats, demand spikes, environmental pressures and more, we know that delivering on this mandate is simple; the complexity is only growing,” said Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager, IBM Automation. “IBM’s collaboration with Flexera adds to our automation portfolio and complements our strategic acquisitions of Turbonomic and Instana and years of AI research and development to provide organisations with a one-stop-shop of IT and business automation capabilities designed to meet these complex challenges.”
“Through this collaboration, we have the opportunity to give customers a seamless experience using an AI-driven, technology value optimisation solution,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “Flexera and IBM provide a dashboard with real-time insights and informed cost optimisation. We can now help our customers right-size their software portfolio for today’s complex IT environments, with applications deployed across multiple clouds, data centres and architectures.”
In addition to the new integration with Turbonomic ARM, IBM is also launching Flexera One with IBM Observability to give organisations a comprehensive solution, backed by IBM support and service level agreements, to monitor and visualise their entire estate software, applications and infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments.
Additionally, IBM Software clients can now use the IT Asset Management component of Flexera One with IBM Observability or Flexera One from Flexera as a certified option to manage their software licenses from IBM alongside other vendors with a single solution.
Last year, IBM acquired Turbonomic to provide businesses with full-stack application observability and management to assure performance, minimise costs and optimise resources – such as containers, VMs, servers, storage, networks, and databases. Organisations such as The Capita Group are using Turbonomic to ensure application performance.
“Turbonomic’s automation platform allows us as a business to transform into a more agile service provider,” said Jerry Aherne, Infrastructure Operations Manager, The Capita Group. “It has allowed us to make informed, proactive decisions that ensure application performance is delivered first and foremost whilst also ensuring costs are kept to a minimum.”
Flexera is part of IBM’s partner ecosystem, which positions partners of all types – whether they build on, service or resell IBM hybrid cloud and AI technologies and platforms – to help clients manage and modernise workloads.
