Partner POV | Operationalize and automate FinOps with Apptio Cloudability and IBM Turbonomics

Article written by Spencer Mehm, Product Marketing Manager, IBM. 

From traditional enterprises to the most innovative startups, organizations are using the public cloud. In fact, ESG Research found that 91% of all applications will eventually be hosted in the public cloud. That much investment has necessitated the FinOps movement, a cloud financial management discipline designed to bring financial accountability to the variable, consumption-based spend model of cloud.

We have seen that experienced FinOps practitioners are pushing the boundaries of "what's possible" in cloud cost management, lobbying for advanced support and use cases. They've mastered cloud adoption and basic cost management but know that the future is about efficiency, optimization and driving value with every dollar spent. What they need now is support from FinOps platforms to help them advance their practice beyond the basics.

IBM Apptio Cloudability and IBM Turbonomic: advancing your FinOps practice

IBM recently completed its acquisition of Apptio Inc. and today we are announcing the first product integration between IBM Apptio Cloudability, for cloud financial management and, IBM Turbonomic, for hybrid cloud cost optimization.

Through this integration, FinOps practitioners cansurface key optimization metrics from Turbonomic within the Cloudability interface, which can help facilitate deeper cost analysis and partnership between engineering, business and finance teams. Combining Cloudability and Turbonomic can also help FinOps practitioners address their top challenges—empowering engineers to automate actions and improving collaboration between engineers and FinOps teams. This integration delivers a set of FinOps capabilities to optimize value from cloud spend while also providing for elasticity and optimal performance of cloud applications. It's a first step in bringing these two powerful solutions together.

How the products work

Cloudability provides organizations with data, insights and recommendations to help better understand their cloud spend. Turbonomic generates hybrid cloud optimization decisions that can be automated to unlock true elasticity and eliminate the need to overprovision. Together, these solutions help enable clients to achieve an end-to-end FinOps lifecycle: inform, optimize and operate.

At each phase, organizations have access to data that can help them control cloud spend.

Initial integration: Surface Turbonomic optimization metrics on Cloudability interface.

What's next?

As IT investments grow, workloads and applications are often spread across public and private clouds, and multiple service providers. This can increase expenses along with the need for simplified, integrated, and automated solutions to optimize that IT spend.

The FinOps solutions landscape is dynamic and constantly evolving. There are point solutions, meaning solutions specialized for only one cloud provider or one area of FinOps, like optimization or container management. Together, Cloudability and Turbonomic, are positioned to offer organizations an end-to-end FinOps solution, no matter how mature their practice is.