IBM Cloudability: 2023 Innovation in Review

2023 was an exciting year for public cloud and the FinOps movement globally. Worldwide cloud spend has continued to grow at close to 20%, with enterprise IT spending on public cloud now approaching that of traditional IT. This is driving incredible innovation across industries, with emerging technologies such as generative AI leading to novel and compelling business opportunities. With this growth in cloud consumption, we are now seeing customers look seriously beyond the three major cloud providers, adopting services that help ensure they’ve got a comprehensive cloud solution at the best price.

With this backdrop, it’s probably no surprise that the FinOps movement has seen serious acceleration — never has it been so important to maximize the business value of cloud! We saw this play out at events throughout last year, capped off by the sold-out FinOps X conference in San Diego. As cloud environments expand and become more complex, FinOps practitioners increasingly rely on specialist solutions like IBM Cloudability to solve their day-to-day challenges and scale best practices. This momentum inspires our product and engineering teams to work even more closely with our customers, with a laser focus on delivering product innovations that have the biggest impact. We appreciate when this product investment is recognized by respected analysts, and we were thrilled to be named a leader in the ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Services – FinOps Services and Cloud Optimization – U.S. 2023.

As we all move swiftly into a new year, we’d like to take this moment to look back at 2023, exploring some of the notable highlights drawn from a long list of product investments.

Cloudability Financial Planning

Being able to confidently forecast future spending and develop sensible budgets across teams is a critical function of IT finance teams. It’s also a particularly complicated task for public cloud, given its variable, consumption-based nature. With this in mind, we launched a new Cloudability add-on, Cloudability Financial Planning, an unmatched solution in the market that modernizes planning with collaborative team inputs, creating accurate forecasts and tracking spend for accountability.

Cloudability Savings Automation

In early 2023, we decided to invest heavily in automating commitment management so that our customers could achieve discount levels not possible with a manual approach. Our acquisition of Cloudwiry last January has evolved into our growing Cloudability Savings Automation, offering customers not only grateful for the additional savings but also appreciating the hours recovered through offloading this work.

Cloudability Government

Apptio was proud to deliver Cloudability Government, a milestone as the first FinOps solution to meet the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization requirements, with a Moderate Impact Level on Feb. 2, 2023. This new platform enables government entities within the United States to save on cloud spending with Cloudability’s industry-leading cost management capabilities.

Integration with Turbonomic

With Apptio joining the IBM stable in 2023, we’ve been excited about the possibility for synergies across products in the IBM portfolio, particularly with d — the leading application resource management solution for virtualized workloads. In October, we launched our first integration, making Turbonomic insights available within Cloudability, giving users a comprehensive view of optimization opportunities across their entire hybrid cloud footprint.

Cost management and optimization for Oracle Cloud

With significant growth in OCI adoption — over 10% of our Cloudability customers are already running workloads in OCI — it only made sense to roll out the full set of FinOps capabilities to this spend. Cloudability customers can now interact with OCI costs in a single-pane-of-glass alongside all other spend, apply business mapping for a full chargeback, rightsize VMs, and fully manage Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

Policy-driven rightsizing with ServiceNow

With this innovation, Cloudability helps solve the number one FinOps challenge: getting engineers to act on cost optimization. We launched a end-to-end integration between ServiceNow and Cloudability’s policy-driven rightsizing, with customers able to automate business workflows and track realized savings for high-value rightsizing opportunities. By pushing the most important recommendations out to engineers and tracking progress, organizations can significantly reduce waste and improve the economics of cloud.

Commitment recommendations for GCP and Azure

Commitment-based discounts are one of the most effective ways of reducing cloud costs. Last year, we added recommendations for GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), with hourly granularity charts and threshold controls helping users make successful purchases for both CPU and memory. We also added support for Azure Savings Plans, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Databricks, thereby extending the reach of Cloudability’s savings insights.

Investments in our data and platform

To round things out, it’s worth quickly covering some of the less glamorous but just as important investments in our data and platform. From a data perspective, these include rolling out full Cost (List) metric support for Azure and adding resource-level analytics for GCP costs, taking advantage of improvements in GCP billing data to enable users to answer far more cost-related questions. We also added dynamic resource weighting (based on the underlying cost of each VM’s CPU and memory) and GPU metric support to our container cost allocation, ensuring accurate allocation back to namespaces and labels. From a platform perspective, we were pleased to make Cloudability available hosted entirely within the EU and also launched Cloudability Government.

Looking forward to a big 2024

As big as 2023 was for the Cloudability product and engineering teams, we are looking forward to an even bigger 2024. Collaborating with the Turbonomic team, we are heavily focused on delivering more capabilities and value for our engineering users. We are also deeply committed to extending our reach to evolving and adjacent cloud technologies, acutely aware that FinOps doesn’t stop at your cloud bill. With this comes additional considerations, such as bringing insights into sustainability and environmental trade-offs.

Stay tuned for more announcements throughout the year and be sure to check out our Cloudability page for more information.