We are constantly working to provide our customers with exciting new features and capabilities across our solutions. This blog series will continue to feature and illustrate our latest capabilities, features, improvements and innovations designed to help you maximize the value of our products. Here’s what’s new at Flexera for April 2025.
Innovation area: ITAM
New: Cloud License Management
New! Cloud License Management helps organizations optimize the cost of software running in the cloud. Built on top of the Flexera Technology Intelligence Platform, Cloud License Management identifies cost saving opportunities, manages your bring your own license (BYOL) and multi-cloud positions and reduces compliance risk.
Gain visibility and tracking of cloud software licenses
Before you can make optimization decisions on your cloud software you first need an overview of what software you have, and where it’s located. With Flexera Cloud License Management, you gain clear visibility into your software spend across multiple cloud platforms dive deep into your spend by product or license model.
Cut down on underutilization and overprovisioning of software licenses
Filter your software spend by product and take a deep dive into usage statistics based on your usage rates with vCPU hours and software utilization hours. Gain an understanding of which instances are costing you the most money and which license type would be most beneficial in each instance (BYOL vs. PAYG).
Maintain license compliance
Ensuring license compliance is a crucial software asset management responsibility, with non-compliance resulting in hefty fines and legal penalties that can destroy the budget of any business. With Flexera Cloud License Management and Flexera One ITAM, you get access to imported entitlement information for a clear view on your current BYOL entitlements, how many have been consumed, your remaining balance and how many cloud instances are eligible for BYOL. Arming you with this information allows you to ensure license compliance while also utilizing your BYOL entitlements to save the most possible on your software for cloud instances.
Accurately forecast and plan your cloud software spend
Allocate your budgets more efficiently and avoid unexpected financial strain. Anticipate future software needs, optimize license usage and prevent overspending by having a clear view of your historical cloud spend and software utilization.
Innovation area: IT Visibility
New: Contextual Data Mashup UI
Contextualize your inventory data (devices, software) in IT Visibility with Contextual Data Mashup User Interface (UI). Previously, adding business-specific context to your inventory data required manual effort and technical knowledge to create scripts via the Contextual Data Store (CDS) API.
Now, the powerful new Contextual Data Mashup capability is available through an intuitive user interface, empowering more users across your organization to quickly and efficiently add critical context to inventory data. Key areas of functionality include:
- Easy CSV upload: Quickly upload your business context against devices or software inventory via CSV files. Contextual Data Mashup automatically detects reference/key and attribute columns and assigns data types to your contextual information, reducing manual intervention and errors.
- Flexible data updates: Seamlessly update existing contextual information or delete outdated data directly through the user interface, ensuring your inventory context stays current and accurate.
- Automatic normalization: Attributes added as part of the contextual information are checked for duplicates with conflicting datatypes, simplifying data management for downstream applications.
- Customizable attributes: Easily rename contextual attributes directly in the UI to align with your organization’s terminology. These datasets can then be conveniently downloaded for offline use and sharing.
- Service account access: The CDS APIs were previously accessible by admin users only. However, with this release, the CDS APIs and UI can be accessed by service accounts and non-admin users who have Manage Contextual Data access, broadening availability and operational flexibility.
- Enhanced device contextualization: Devices can now be matched using a combination of device name, domain, and serial number, in addition to the hardware ID, with no extra preparation, simplifying and accelerating your data contextualization.
These enhanced contextualization capabilities significantly reduce manual intervention, ensure data consistency, and deliver visibility through integrated Power BI reports for faster and more informed decisions across the organization. 
Enhancement: Evidence UI and processing
Evidence UI has been improved in the Technology Intelligence Platform for IT Visibility. The existing evidence view will now pull data from the Data Lakehouse, improving accuracy and currency of information.
Evidence data is now updated at the same rate as inventory with consistent results across relevant datasets. As a result of this upgrade, some customers may notice updated evidence counts in the following areas:
- Inventory > Hardware Evidence
- Applications & Evidence > Software Evidence
- Inventory > Devices
Why have evidence results changed?
- Recognized records now show under their correct product, model, and manufacturer categories and are no longer included in the count of unrecognized records.
- A bug that caused orphaned records to contribute to the counts has been resolved.
Expect more accurate and up-to-date data with IT Visibility Evidence UI for an improved experience and consistent results with Power BI Reporting in IT Visibility.
Improved software recognition from BMC Discovery
Additionally, IT Visibility with Technology Intelligence Platform now supports file evidence from BMC Discovery, enhancing accuracy and more reliably representing your software recognition. View software recognition data derived from file evidence within your IT Visibility dashboards and gain improved transparency and insight into your IT estate.
Innovation area: SaaS Management
New: Salesforce Connector capabilities
We now provide Family view with different tabs and Salesforce specific insights. Discover more data, including organizations, license types, profiles and more, which provide new insights and perspectives:
- More granular visibility into Salesforce estate
- Out-of-the-box insights for optimization
- Ability to analyze the data based on different aspects
- Better user experience and quicker path to the information
New: Microsoft Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Connector
Configure and run the Microsoft Defender Connector to pull in all users and usage data from MS Defender for the last 30 days. Display usage data for recognized applications through the Data Intelligence Service. Unrecognized applications will be hidden from the UI and all activity for these applications will be discarded until Q2 2025, when all unrecognized applications will be displayed. Benefits from this improved visibility include:
- Reduce costs by eliminating Shadow SaaS spend leakage
- Mitigate cyberattack risk and potential data loss by removing Shadow SaaS applications
- Eliminate compliance violations with enhanced governance of SaaS estate
- Improve negotiation position with SaaS vendors via economies of scale
Private Application Catalog
Create in-house applications using Private Applications Catalog configuration screen. Configure the URL to track activity for any in-house SaaS application and, coming. in the next update cycle, all usage for this in-house application can be captured and displayed in SaaS Management UI. This new capability delivers:
- More accurate budget forecasts for technology spend
- Improved control over software spend
- More staff time for business-critical priorities rather than manual tasks
- Application Rationalization: reduce spend by identifying where you may have in-house applications redundant with third party applications
Innovation area: Security / Software Vulnerability Management (SVM)
Software Vulnerability Research March 2025 Updates
The latest release of Software Vulnerability Research includes important security updates and enhancements, including security fixes, customer-reported issues and internal work orders.
This release also includes a customer-specific fix to enhance security and stability as well as internal work orders to further improve performance and reliability. For more information, please click here for release notes and click here for the community blog.
Software Vulnerability Manager
Software Vulnerability Manager On-prem R1 v 7.6.1.32 is now available for download and this new version of the on-prem edition is compatible with the latest version of the Patch Publisher v 7.25.1926. All recent updates made to the SVM Cloud and Patch Publisher will now be available to our SVM on-prem customers through this update. Some important enhancements include:
Patch Publisher enhancements
- Hide Deployment notifications for Workspace ONE connections: A new “Hide Notification” checkbox has been added when connecting to Workspace ONE. Turn off notifications on endpoint client machines to reduce unnecessary alerts and ensure a smoother experience.
- Default SVM Connection URL updated: The default SVM Connection URL in Patch Publisher has been updated to the new SVM Cloud URL.
- Enhanced performance when adding groups from Intune: The Intune Assignment Groups dialog now features pagination with next and previous buttons, improving navigation between pages, enhancing performance and delivering faster loading times.
SVM enhancements
- Manage assignments in Quick Patch: Improve the management of endpoint deployments during Intune publishing, with Manage Assignments. Assign deployments within the endpoint management system, including specific groups, all devices or all users during endpoint deployments in Intune publishing. These assignments can be applied across the Required, Available, and Uninstall sections.
- Paginated Intune Groups: In the Manage Assignments option of QuickPatch, Subscription, and Patch Deployment Status pages, the Intune Assignment Groups dialog box now includes improved pagination with scrolling. Gain improved usability and navigation with dataset loading as you scroll.
- For more information, please click here for release notes and click here for the community blog.
Innovation area: FinOps
New: Cost Planning in Cloud Cost Optimization
Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization’s (CCO) new Cost Planning feature expands on the previous budget functionality by bringing AI cost forecasting data into the cost plan/budget process. Users can now create a new cost plan and retrieve forecasting data from our AI model based on user-specified historical data. Budgets and forecasts are now independent, and budgets can be tracked against a forecast visually in the UI or exported to CSV or XLSX formats. For more information, please check out the product announcement.
New: MSP capabilities in Cloud Cost Optimization
Flexera partners can gain more value and grow their FinOps services with new capabilities in Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization.
Granular Price Book Adjustments
There are a wealth of new benefits awaiting partners in this update.
- Enable adjustments at a service and usage type level. Partners can go into specific service line items and even target usage types within those services, including targeting adjustments based on various billing file dimensions. This level of detail allows for highly tailored pricing strategies.
- Gain unparalleled flexibility for price book rules. Whatever dimensions partners see within the billing file can be pulled into a rule. This allows for very specific, sophisticated pricing and margin management strategies.
- Control the visibility and application of discounts and credits in customer billing. Remove specific line items like credits from price books.
- Apply price book rules to different customer groupings. Target price book rules at all customers, a single customer, or a group of customers. Easily implement tiered pricing or custom agreements for different customer segments.
Better Customer Management and Visibility
Partners can now holistically manage customers through Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization.
- Create customer organizations, or child organizations. Logically separate and manage individual customers within their central MSP tenant for greater efficiency.
- Gain granular control over capabilities and ownership at the customer organization level. This allows for customized service offerings and clear assignment of responsibility for each customer within the MSP’s structure.
- Transparent control for the partner, invisible to the end customer. End customers see a final, accurate cost without exposure to the underlying partner adjustments.
MSP partners can find details in our documentation here. For more, please email us at msp@flexera.com.
Innovation area: DevOps
New for Azure users: hybrid autoscaling on commitments and spot VMs
Microsoft Azure users, say goodbye to costly on-demand compute! Spot Ocean and Elastigroup, now part of the Flexera family of applications, can seamlessly move VM or AKS workloads between Azure spot VMs, reservations, and savings plans. This means always having discounted resources to run your workloads.
Spot Ocean and Elastigroup will:
- Automatically prioritize usage of existing commitments over purchasing on-demand resources – in scaling events and spot instance evictions alike—so you use what you already paid for instead of increasing spend and waste.
- Automatically Forfeit commitments if they are more needed elsewhere (e.g. fault-intolerant workloads) and switch to spot instances instead.
- Allow granular reservation usage control at the Virtual Node Group (VNG) level for Azure Kubernetes Service users.
What’s next?
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