Flexera, which focuses on technology spend and risk management, closed the acquisition of NetApp’s Spot, an intelligent data infrastructure company. The transaction is regarded as Flexera’s latest step toward offering comprehensive solutions to help organizations confront cloud cost and usage hurdles, especially as AI consumption surges and strains cloud budgets.
With the purchase, Flexera can expand its cloud financial management offering into a suite of AI-powered FinOps technologies, and enhances the offerings’ value by expanding its partner ecosystem.
This newly bolstered FinOps portfolio from Flexera will allow organizations and MSPs to manage cloud financial commitments, automate billing and invoicing, reduce workload cost and optimize containers. This includes data centers, SaaS and public cloud, while also supporting enhanced use cases such as software licensing and sustainability.
“The need for FinOps and cloud cost optimization has never been greater, as critical AI initiatives create more urgency for boards and c-suites to effectively contain swelling cloud and IT spend,” said Flexera president and CEO, Jim Ryan. “We believe that by bringing Spot and its core products into the Flexera FinOps portfolio, we are now the most comprehensive provider in the space. This also complements our leading positions in IT Asset Management and SaaS Management.”
The Spot business adds new capabilities to Flexera’s FinOps solution, with Kubernetes cost management, and accelerates innovation in container management, spot cloud instances and commitment management. Spot’s main product lines include:
- Spot Eco – helps unlock cloud services’ value with a series of cloud commitment management features, ensuring organizations capture critical savings from reserved instances, savings plans or committed usage discounts, across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
- Spot Ocean – Kubernetes infrastructure management product that provides continuous optimization of containers for cost, performance and availability.
- Spot Elastigroup – allows organizations to scale workloads and maximize cloud investment value, with spot instances and virtual machines.
- CloudCheckr – cloud cost management tool that allows enterprise, MSPs and distributors to manage and reduce cloud cost, optimize resources, gain operational efficiency, manage billing and invoicing, improve governance and strengthen security and compliance.
These solutions are accompanied by a robust portfolio of policy-based best practice checks for cost, security, governance and compliance.
“The completion of this transaction further hones our focus of our Public Cloud business,” said NetApp EVP, intelligent operations services, Haiyan Song. “Our highly differentiated first party and marketplace cloud storage services are complemented by intelligent data and operational services such as Data Infrastructure Insights and Instaclustr. These services, in concert with our Hybrid Cloud products, enable customers to build a seamless intelligent data infrastructure across hybrid multi-cloud. We believe that Flexera is the right environment for Spot portfolio of solutions, employees and customers to thrive.”
Flexera’s integration of Spot also creates new opportunities for partners – particularly MSPs and distributors – to develop or enhance their own FinOps services. With Flexera, partners have a chance to tap into a broader portfolio of technologies and specialists, while building value-added services that cover the expanded definition of FinOps to include ITAM and software licensing, SaaS management, AI spend management and more.
