Apptio, the leading technology spend and value management company, today launched new FinOps capabilities to its Cloudability product family, further reducing the complexity of managing and optimizing multi-cloud environments. New releases include expanded optimization recommendations across the major public cloud providers, support for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), and Cloudability Savings Automation. These innovations promote multi-cloud parity by improving visibility into resource and container usage and spending across different cloud platforms, yielding greater financial savings.
“Having an effective FinOps strategy today means more than just adopting cloud and keeping tabs on the cost – businesses need to optimize and drive value with every dollar spent,” said Julian Casabene, Cloud Operations Lead at ANZ. “Cloudability, along with the upcoming Cloudability Financial Planning tooling, lets us plan and forecast at the pace of innovation while ensuring our investments are optimized, no matter the cloud environment.”
Cloud-native application innovation and economic pressures are driving a continued rise in public cloud usage, and subsequently, a rise in FinOps adoption to manage growing cloud costs and complexity. This is even more imperative today given the surge by cloud decision makers to use two or more public clouds, with the number of organizations leveraging a multi-cloud approach rising over 40% on the Apptio Cloudability platform.
FinOps practitioners are looking to drive value with every dollar spent by increasing efficiency and optimization and bringing visibility and control to the total cost and unit economics of running applications across cloud. In order to support these needs, FinOps platforms must provide additional data-driven capabilities and multi-cloud support.
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“In 2023, everyone is asking about FinOps,” wrote Tracy Woo, Senior Analyst at Forrester. “Almost 80% of my conversations are dominated by FinOps, even within other discussions related to skills, governance, hybrid cloud, etc. Conversations almost always fall back to FinOps and the question of ‘How can we manage our spend better?’ What started in conversations among frustrated cloud administrators struggling with cloud costs and arduous conversations with finance teams to translate cloud bills has risen in importance — all the way to the C-level. Executives have caught on to the FinOps buzz and want to know what it can do for them and their business.”
“50% of companies cite overall cloud costs and visibility into those costs as their biggest business challenges, with visibility a particular issue for beginners in the cloud. Even organizations with a single cloud strategy find themselves in a multi-cloud environment when making acquisitions,” said Dan Ortman, Global FinOps Practice Director at SoftwareOne, a leading global software and cloud solutions provider and Apptio strategic partner. “The ability to have consistent visibility and reporting enables them to take advantage of scale and get the most out of their collective cloud investment.”
Apptio is extending Cloudability’s leadership in FinOps with additional rightsizing and optimization recommendations across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The new market-leading breadth of services include:
- Azure Savings Plan Recommendations: Cloudability offers recommendations for Azure Savings Plan purchases, enabling customers to further analyze, strategize and optimize cloud costs by increasing their committed spend coverage.
- GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUD) Recommendations: Users can adjust the scope of evaluated usage and shift the preferred coverage level up and down to match their profile. Improved visibility leads to higher CUD coverage and lower hourly rates for virtual machines.
- Workload Planning (in Beta): Provides users the ability to model costs and select resources for a range of server types across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.
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Through its improved Kubernetes integration, Cloudability surfaces container usage and spending with ROSA to identify areas of inefficiency or overspending, and then makes recommendations to right size utilization or save costs. This builds on the existing Cloudability capabilities with container cost management and allocation in the public cloud, with automated cluster cost mapping and intelligent resource utilization data and allocation.
The innovation in Cloudability is further enhanced by expanding capabilities across the Cloudability family. In addition to the recently announced Cloudability Government offering, Cloudability Financial Planning is currently in beta, bringing Apptio’s proven financial planning and forecasting and other Technology Business Management (TBM) capabilities to multi-cloud deployments.
Finally, Cloudability Savings Automation is a new name and version of Cloudwiry, which Apptio acquired in January 2023. Cloudability Savings Automation gives Cloudability users savings automation tools that manages savings instruments for customers and automatically maximizes savings by dynamically adjusting those savings instruments to fit the pattern of resource usage.
“Our customers are choosing to use more than one public cloud, and they want the advanced financial management capabilities we’ve provided on the private cloud and on-prem side across this new hybrid, multi-cloud environment,” said Eugene Khvostov, Chief Product Officer at Apptio. “This release is the culmination of our team pushing the envelope of what’s possible with FinOps in a multi-cloud world, and we’ll continue to deliver deeper integration with container and cloud platforms with greater automation and performance.”
