Recently, Flexera and IBM announced an exciting and strategic partnership. I wanted to expand on what this partnership means from my perspective. There are two relevant facets to the partnership:
- Flexera One ITAM is a certified alternative to IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT)
- Integration between Flexera One ITAM and IBM Turbonomic to optimize cost and performance powered by AI
For years, Flexera has been imploring the largest software and technology suppliers to make it easier to manage usage and remain in compliance.
You would be hard pressed to find a more dysfunctional supply chain in any other industry than what exists in software and technology. What other supply chain provides limited to no assistance to their customers in tracking consumption… and then regularly audits them?
Software and technology suppliers don’t provide enough visibility to help enterprise customers manage licenses, inventory or cloud costs. As difficult as license compliance is with data center applications, the problem grows exponentially as the market deploys more technology to the cloud and hybrid licensing becomes the norm.
Flexera believes it’s a bold and proactive move for IBM to recognize this challenge and collaborate with Flexera.
Flexera One ITAM Certification
As part of the agreement, Flexera and IBM are collaborating to certify the reporting of Flexera One and enriching Flexera One’s content libraries to provide more comprehensive IBM product recognition. This is a huge advantage for our customers—they can now leverage Flexera One ITAM to achieve two key objectives: satisfy IBM reporting requirements AND optimize spend and risk for IBM and other strategic vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow and more.
By embracing Flexera, IBM is acknowledging a market reality: enterprise customers want a single platform to manage their technology assets, consumption levels and entitlements across their estate, not multiple tools from multiple suppliers.
For decades Flexera has operated at the nexus of where technology suppliers (e.g., IBM, SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Salesforce) and their customers (you) intersect. As an independent and trusted third party, our goal has always been, and will remain, to deliver consumption and entitlement data that allows our customers to be on equal footing (or better) with their suppliers during ELA negotiations.
As cloud becomes more prevalent, hybrid IT optimization will become essential and your spend levels with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other public cloud providers must be factored into the way in which you manage tech spend. Our strong yet unbiased relationship with IBM is a giant leap forward in helping you manage a highly complex area of spend and risk.
The IBM agreement is centered around Flexera’s SaaS offering only. Over the past four years we have spent considerable resources modernizing our offering to be a multi-tenanted, SOC3-compliant, microservices- and API-driven architecture that allows you to scale and integrate with ITSM, Ariba, Coupa, Tanium and other technologies that are core to your business.
As you would expect from any world-class SaaS provider, your data is not only secure—it is YOUR data. Unless specifically authorized by you, Flexera will never share license positions, usage or any other data with IBM. Authorization must come via your agreements with IBM.
IT Asset Management
It all starts with knowing what’s in your IT ecosystem. Flexera One discovers even the most elusive assets whether on-prem, SaaS, cloud, containers and more.
Flexera One and IBM Turbonomic Integration
The Flexera One integration with Turbonomic is also exciting because we are automating the challenges you face in competing for global talent. As attrition and salaries spike, each of us is facing an unprecedented challenge remaining at full staffing capacity. One way to avoid incremental staffing costs is to implement a SaaS offering such as Flexera One. The other way to address resource limitations is by automating as much as possible. Many of our existing customers are excited about Flexera’s definitive technology data combining forces with AI-driven resource management from IBM. The integration is a great fit with Gartner’s concept of Digital Platform Conductor Tools as the innovative model to strategically help customers manage their digital infrastructure and apps in a way that’s agile, yet governed and risk aware.
The combined solution provides unprecedented governance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now you can optimize for both resource performance and licensing costs. Flexera’s consumption intelligence is unsurpassed; it’s one of the major reasons IBM chose us as a partner. We’re unlocking the ability to deliver truly elastic environments while assuring performance balanced with cost optimization and risk reduction.
Innovation for Hybrid IT Optimization
We hear you loud and clear: managing and optimizing a hybrid IT environment is challenging and we’re working on innovative ways to solve those challenges. I’m proud of the endorsement from IBM in forming this partnership, and the fact that it will lead to immediate value and additional planned innovation for our customers. Working with your ecosystem vendors such as IBM is a great example of our strategy to align you with your key suppliers. The business outcome of maximizing the value of your technology is our sole mission.
