Flexera & IBM collaborate on hybrid IT governance

IBM has announced two products designed to improve hybrid IT governance.

First up is IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management, the first fruits of IBM’s acquisition of Turbonomic in 2021. By combining Turbonomic’s existing IaaS management capabilities with IBM’s AIOps, the aim is to automate cloud governance and performance.  

Alongside this comes Flexera One with IBM Observability, which will be available as a SaaS solution from March 18th 2022. Flexera One is Flexera’s latest platform for IT Asset Management, and this new product leverages Flexera’s strengths in building rich software entitlement and usage data across the entire estate. This solution is also fully-certified for direct management of IBM software licenses, replacing the need to use ILMT for sub-capacity and CloudPak license management.  

Core Capabilities by Provider 

IBM see their ability to deliver hybrid IT governance solutions via RedHat and other product lines as key in enabling very large cloud-sceptic customers to modernise their IT estates. However, there are considerable challenges, particularly for organisations working in highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare. Not the least of these is visibility across the entire estate – whether that be of any endpoint device, of an on-premises datacentre, or of the cloud.   

These new solutions go some way to addressing these concerns by providing a single pane of glass view of the entire estate in Flexera One and using Turbonomic and AIOps to automate governance. In doing so the aim will be to reduce risk, monitor application performance, and minimise costs.  

IBM have a long-standing relationship with Flexera so this partnership shouldn’t come as a surprise. However, this does strengthen that relationship with IBM now reselling Flexera One, potentially opening the door to new enterprise-scale customers for Flexera. What will be interesting to see is if further partnerships with other ITAM & IaaS tool providers are forthcoming. IBM’s core strength here is in AI and in their enterprise customer base so might we see similar partnerships with vendors such as Ivanti, USU, and ServiceNow?