Building a FinOps solution for all with the IBM FinOps suite

21 May 2024

3 min read

This past fall, we announced the first product integration between IBM Cloudability and IBM Turbonomic. This initial integration enabled FinOps practitioners to surface key optimization metrics from Turbonomic within the Cloudability interface, which can help facilitate deeper cost analysis and partnership between engineering, business and finance teams. In the age of AI, where technology budgets are under extraordinary scrutiny, we have continued our investment in FinOps to help our customers reallocate their spend on what matters — innovation and customer experiences. Today we are excited to announce the IBM FinOps suite.

The IBM FinOps suite brings together a FinOps solution for all. Through combining the capabilities of Cloudability and Turbonomic in one unified IBM Cloudability Premium product, IBM offers a solution for all practitioners, at all maturity levels. Whether you are focused on the Inform, Optimize, or Operate phase of your FinOps journey, IBM FinOps is designed to advance your practice with capabilities that help make cloud a competitive advantage for your business. The IBM FinOps suite is engineered to increase the value of cloud investments while ensuring that applications get the resources they need to perform across public cloud, private cloud, and containers. As your FinOps practice matures, and you adopt more cloud-native applications, our solutions are designed to grow with you by offering advanced insights, planning, and automation.

Challenges met head-on

The IBM FinOps suite addresses the most pressing challenges in cloud financial management:

Cost Transparency and Control: Effectively track to optimize program costs through visualizing and normalizing spend across cloud providers, cloud services, containerized infrastructure, commitment programs, and shared costs. Detailed insights, comprehensive analytics and flexible reporting capabilities helps organizations understand, manage and forecast cloud costs with greater accuracy, helping ensure that teams are accountable for their cloud consumption and cloud budgets are more precise and defensible.

Operational Efficiency: Complementing these financial capabilities is the ability to easily surface cloud waste to spur optimization – helping practitioners apply FinOps practices across their full stack. automate optimization actions based on real-time demands to help ensure that resources are efficiently utilized while improving performance without the risk of over-provisioning. Achieve further efficiency by defining goals that correlate to business impact and leverage our automated optimization.

Collaborative FinOps: FinOps practitioners need products that are designed with FinOps personas in mind, bringing together IT, finance, and DevOps teams to optimize cloud resources for speed, cost, and quality. This synergy helps in aligning business and financial strategies with technical execution, fostering a unified approach to cloud financial management.

Hyland’s transformational FinOps journey

A prime example of the benefits derived from Cloudability is the success story of Hyland (link resides outside ibm.com), a global leader in content services. Faced with escalating cloud costs and complex resource management, Hyland turned to Cloudability to streamline its cloud operations.

Hyland had a significant AWS footprint, and in order to enhance cloud elasticity, Hyland’s IT leaders realized they needed to increase the transparency in the operation of its AWS cloud usage. Through leveraging Cloudabilitly to address anomalies, limit overprovisiong resources and provide cost analysis Hyland was able to drive transparency and reduce cloud spending.

Also, as Hyland advanced its FinOps practice, it has extended these capabilities into the operational domain with Turbonomic optimization (link resides outside ibm.com). Using AI-driven analytics from Turbonomic to make real-time adjustments that balance performance needs with cost-efficiency.

Hyland drove this transformation with the products independently. Now with the IBM FinOps suite, Hyland can leverage detailed financial management from Cloudability with proactive operational optimization from Turbonomic under one unified solution. As Hyland’s FinOps practices matures, the IBM FinOps suite will be able to grow with them offering advanced insights, planning and automation.

A unified approach to FinOps

As FinOps teams become increasingly cross-functional and work together to address evolving challenges, the need for tooling designed to help practitioners navigate their FinOps journey with tools that can grow as in line with their team, scope, and goals is critical.

Cloudability provides a granular view into cloud expenses, offering tools that help organizations track, analyze, and optimize their cloud spend. Its robust financial management framework helps businesses track spend by consumer, measure unit economics and enforce internal policy with automation. IBM Turbonomic extends these capabilities into the operational domain, using AI-driven analytics to make real-time adjustments that balance performance needs with cost-efficiency. By building these essential elements into one unified experience, IBM is revolutionizing the way FinOps team manage their cloud resources. By combining detailed financial management with proactive operational optimization, the IBM FinOps suite is looking to set new standards in the industry, enabling businesses to not only keep pace with the evolving cloud landscape but to lead it.

Author

Spencer Mehm

Product Marketing Manager