IBM Cloudability Introduces New Innovations for FinOps Practitioners

Apptio, an IBM company, recently announced several new FinOps product innovations at IBM’s Think 24 conference. At FinOps X we are continuing this momentum and announcing additional new FinOps product innovations that were delivered in the first half of 2024.  These new capabilities help FinOps practitioners increase the value of their cloud investments, wherever they are in their FinOps journey.

At IBM Think 2024, IBM Apptio announced:

• A re-branding of our FinOps solution to IBM Cloudability
• A new integrated IBM FinOps offering
• Enhanced third-party cloud cost management
• A new FinOps solution for MSPs

These new offerings – combined with the releases we’re announcing at FinOps X – further enhance the IBM Cloudability portfolio to give FinOps practitioners the tools they need to understand and optimize their cloud spend while ensuring that optimal cloud performance needs are met.

Workload Planning

Workload Planning is an industry-first capability that enables FinOps practitioners to plan, save and share information for upcoming cloud workloads. Defining a new workload starts with describing the specific requirements of the underlying resources – such as CPU cores for VMs, databases, etc. – and then comparing pricing and deployment options across cloud vendors, all from a single, intuitive user interface.

The solution makes it very easy for users to compare all vendors, regions, and resource types that match these requirements, so they can quickly identify the most cost-effective deployment options and provision the workloads.

The result for FinOps leaders is not only cost-effective workloads, but improved collaboration across teams and higher confidence levels in their financial planning. The Workload Planning feature is generally available to all IBM Cloudability customers.

FOCUS Billing Support (beta)

IBM Cloudability supports a broad set of cloud costs, ingesting billing data from the major public cloud providers as well as popular solutions such as Datadog, Databricks, and Snowflake. These costs can all be managed via a single pane of glass through our interactive dashboards and resource-level analytics. With more and more specialized cloud offerings, including CDNs, observability solutions, and AI platforms, there is an increasing need to improve visibility across more sources of spend.

The emergence of The FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) as an open-source specification has defined clear requirements for cloud vendors to produce consistent cost and usage datasets and is designed to reduce the complexity for FinOps practitioners.

The beta release of IBM Cloudability supports the ingestion of any FOCUS compliant cost and usage data. This makes it simpler for all FinOps practitioners to benefit from Cloudability using dashboards, views, business mapping, and forecasting to bring financial accountability to all corners of cloud spend.

Cloud Sustainability Reporting (beta)

We are excited to extend our cloud sustainability reporting, adding two important metrics to IBM Cloudability’s rich set of cloud analytics: Estimated Carbon Emissions (MTCO2e) and Power Consumed (kWh), available in beta.

Calculated based on actual resource utilization for popular services across AWS, Azure, and GCP, these new metrics are available within IBM Cloudability’s dashboards and reports alongside regular cost and usage metrics. This makes it easy to track carbon emissions and power consumption over time, using your favorite visualizations to identify the applications, teams, and business groups responsible.

This is an important launch for organizations that want to assess the sustainability implications of their public cloud usage or need to satisfy emerging regulatory requirements for complete emissions reporting, especially in Europe. This data can also be combined with the recently announced Sustainability Reporting service offering as part of a broader view of carbon metrics across a hybrid cloud. Cloud sustainability reporting will be generally available later in 2024.

Spend-based CUD Management for GCP

We recently added spend-based CUD (sometimes called Flexi CUDs or SCUDs) purchase recommendations and portfolio management to IBM Cloudability. This makes Cloudability the first FinOps tool on the market to provide resource-based and spend-based commitment recommendations for all the major cloud providers.

These insights are delivered by a brand-new user interface that provides flexible tuning options and informative KPIs. A combination of visibility into historical usage patterns, projections of future savings, and awareness of current performance is used to deliver recommendations. The result for FinOps practitioners is improved confidence when purchasing GCP SCUDs, leading to superior coverage rates and higher overall cost savings.

Cloudability APAC Tenancy

For customers based in APAC, IBM Cloudability is now available with all deployed components and data residing in Australia via a fully redundant system. This supports customers in countries like Australia that have data residency or data sovereignty requirements for their software applications requiring their data to remain in-country. This new tenancy includes both cloud billing and usage data. New customers in the APAC region will be deployed to this new instance of IBM Cloudability while existing customers may elect to migrate their tenancy.

IBM Cloudability continues to innovate with new products and capabilities that drive meaningful business outcomes by supporting FinOps practitioners with the tools they need wherever they are on their FinOps journey.

For more information on IBM Cloudability, visit our product page or start a free trial. For existing IBM Cloudability customers interested in participating in any beta programs, please reach out to your account management team for more details.