IBM going big with AIOps solutions for enterprises this year

AIOps (Artificial intelligence for IT operations) is expected to help businesses simplify most of their complex and time-intensive tasks. IT teams have already pointed out that most tasks and workloads today can be automated as businesses continue their cloud adoption.

In fact, a Flexera Study found that 34% of a typical IT spend budget is on software and SaaS applications, yet nearly half of respondents cited the need to focus on how to better manage these products and improve the reclamation of underused or unused products. This may lead to enterprises facing significant cost penalties if licenses are found to be non-compliant or if they are over-or under-utilizing resources.

At the same time, there is a huge talent gap in the industry which can affect the digital journey for enterprises. A Gartner report of IT executives cited talent availability as the main adoption risk factor for the majority of IT automation technologies (75%).

With that said, AIOps is now becoming a key tool for enterprises around the world to overcome these challenges. Enterprises also need to be sure to have an AIOps that is able to cater specifically to their business demand, and not just use it without understanding how the tech can benefit them.

As such, IBM has 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 expected to help businesses lower costs and automate the increasingly complex tasks of software license compliance and optimization.

The new solutions have been developed to integrate 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 Flexera One insights are 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, the complexity is only growing,” said Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager, IBM Automation.

For Jim Ryan, Flexera President and CEO, Flexera and IBM are providing a dashboard with real-time insights and informed cost optimization. Both companies can now help customers right-size their software portfolio for today’s complex IT environments, with applications deployed across multiple clouds, data centers, and architectures.

Apart from the integration with Turbonomic ARM, IBM also launched 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.

IBM acquired Turbonomic in 2021 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.