IBM announced 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.

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, GM, 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.

Flexera is part of IBM's partner ecosystem, which positions partners of all types – whether they build on, service or resell IBM hybrid cloud and AI technologies and platforms – to help clients manage and modernize workloads.