IBM Taps AIOps to Automate Software License Compliance

March 16, 2022

IBM introduced new solutions with IT management software company, Flexera, and IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management (ARM) to help organizations use automation to streamline IT asset management. The new solutions are aimed at helping businesses lower costs and automate the increasingly complex tasks of software license compliance and optimization.

IT business leaders have reported that IT asset management has become a complex, expensive and time-intensive task for enterprises as they continue to adopt a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy with software and applications running across public, private and on-premises environments. A Flexera Study found that 34 percent of a typical IT spend budget is on software and SaaS applications, yet nearly half of respondents cited they need to focus on how to better manage these products and improve the reclamation of underused or unused products. Because of this, enterprises can face significant cost penalties if licenses are found to be non-compliant or if they are over- or under- utilizing 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 main adoption risk factor for the majority of IT automation technologies (75%). Businesses need IT expertise to manage automation technologies.

To help organizations overcome these challenges, IBM and Flexera have developed integrations with Turbonomic ARM and Flexera One to help visualize their IT estate from on-premises to SaaS to cloud. Businesses can then automate the manual tasks of software license and resource optimization. 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. The combination of Turbonomic ARM combined with software license data, utilization data and insights from Flexera One, is designed to help businesses mitigate the risk of penalties from software non-compliance to minimize surprise billings. The integrated solution also helps identify areas of underutilization so that enterprises can find ways to balance overall costs and help ensure their resources are being optimized for performance.

"IT professionals have what is in theory a simple mandate, to maintain and improve IT operations. But in the face of labor shortages, geographic disruptions, security threats, demand spikes, environmental pressures and more, we know that delivering on this mandate is anything but simple, in fact 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, as well as years of AI research and development to provide organizations 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 optimization solution," said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. "Flexera and IBM are providing a dashboard with real-time insights and informed cost optimization. We can now help our customers right-size their software portfolio for today's complex IT environments, with applications deployed across multiple clouds, datacenters and architectures."

In addition to the new integration with Turbonomic ARM, IBM is also launching Flexera One with IBM Observability to give organizations a comprehensive solution, backed by IBM support and service level agreements, to monitor and visualize their entire estate of software, applications and infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments. Flexera One with IBM Observability will be available as a SaaS solution on March 18, 2022.

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, minimize costs and optimize resources – such as containers, VMs, servers, storage, networks, and databases. Organizations 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."