Flexera help customers’ cloud scale right with acquisition of RightScale

27 September 2018
4 minute read
Software publishers

Flexera help customers’ cloud scale right with acquisition of RightScale

27 September 2018
4 minute read

Flexera yesterday (September 26, 2018) announced the purchase of RightScale, a leader in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management market.

Market background

Spending on public cloud – services such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure – is estimated to reach $56 billion by 2020 (MarketsandMarkets). It is also estimated that, on average, 35% of this spend is wasted (Flexera) – often because services have been over-provisioned, incorrectly set up, or not turned off after use.

Waste of almost $20 billion annually presents a huge opportunity for ITAM departments around the world to make big savings and thus make a big impact within their organisations.

Why RightScale?

Speaking with Tom Canning, Flexera SVP Ecosystem and Strategy, he told us IaaS Management is an area Flexera have been looking to address for a while and that RightScale had the best tools for the job.

As well as their technical capabilities, Canning praised RightScale as thought leaders within the IaaS management space; their annual “State of the Cloud” report being looked to as a great indicator of market trends and highlight that they were recently recognised as a leader in 2 separate Forrester Wave reports.

He also noted that the cultural fit was good between the two companies and that Flexera had “gained some really good people and great thought leaders”, perhaps showing that the benefits to Flexera extend beyond a simple technology purchase.

Looking at features, this acquisition will enable Flexera to:

  • Identify/rectify cloud overspend
  • Consolidate management of multiple cloud environments
  • Identify security risks within a customer’s public cloud environment
  • Set and enforce policies to pro-actively manage governance

And more – all this alongside their existing capabilities that have recently been bolstered by the acquisition of BDNA a year ago, and MetaSAAS in May 2018.

Flexera customers will be able to see, for example, where an Azure Reserved Instance could be used to reduce costs, or where an on-premises workload would be a good candidate for migrating to Amazon AWS.

Brian White, ITAM Solutions Director at Civica, a RightScale MSP, believes Flexera have seen the same things in RightScale that led Civica to partner with them for their Cloud Optimisation Service.

White says that “getting a clear inventory of who is using what, assigning cost to technical areas for re-charge, and managing the asset lifecycle to drive value for money are really important” when approaching cloud management from a SAM perspective. A market review led him to the decision that RightScale “were a company on the up with some great people and leadership” – and it seems Flexera agree!

End to end spend management

This type of cloud spending accounts for around 20% of a typical IT budget which means, according to Canning, the RightScale acquisition puts Flexera in a position to manage approximately 60% of a typical IT budget.

While this end to end reach is a great asset for Flexera, and surely a boon for their customers, Canning did mention that Flexera have no aspirations to become a platform akin to SalesForce or ServiceNow. He was clear that Flexera continue to be focused on asset management and the software supply chain, and the development of deep technology in these areas to help customers fully control their software spend.

Can’t find what you’re looking for?