Technology spend and risk management company Flexera is boosting its FinOps portfolio by acquiring the FinOps Business arm from NetApp, Inc., an intelligent data infrastructure company, as part of its broader 2025 strategy.
Flexera aims to strengthen its FinOps offerings
Spot by NetApp FinOps will help strengthen Flexera’s ability to better serve customers and partners seeking to manage the increasing costs of multi-cloud and FinOps needs across a broader range of services from hybrid cloud, SaaS applications, and containers. The acquisition will add new capabilities, such as Kubernetes cost management and commitment management, to Flexera’s FinOps portfolio, while also allowing the company to develop a richer ecosystem of FinOps MSPs to serve customers’ evolving needs and bring new DevOps users into its community.
“Our acquisition of Spot is the next step in Flexera’s strategic plan to provide organizations with a full panorama of their technology spend and risk across the entire IT ecosystem,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “We want to make it easy for anyone to find and analyze any data related to spend and risk for any kind of technology, anywhere it lives.”
Further, Spot’s AI- and ML-enabled technology will combine with Flexera’s hybrid cloud expertise to offer a comprehensive FinOps solution to enhance financial accountability and efficiency in cloud operations. It will also align with the expanding scope of FinOps which now includes data centers, SaaS applications, and public cloud, in addition to the growing FinOps framework that includes software licensing and sustainability.
“A tsunami of artificial intelligence applications is exponentially increasing organizations’ consumption of cloud resources,” said Ryan. “Yet, we hear from many organizations about the difficulty in answering basic questions like ‘what technology services do we use?’ and ‘why are our cloud bills so high?’”
The Spot solutions will provide continuous automation, optimization, and insights into an organization’s cloud infrastructure and applications.
“This decision reflects NetApp’s sharpened focus and underscores our commitment to intelligent data infrastructure and long-term growth opportunities,” said Haiyan Song, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Operations Services, at NetApp. “After a thorough evaluation, it is clear that Flexera’s established expertise and global reach provide the ideal environment for the Spot business to thrive and scale. This move not only allows the Spot team and portfolio to unlock their full potential within Flexera’s ecosystem but also reinforces our dedication to driving value creation and achieving our ambitious growth objectives.”
Enhancing Flexera’s partner ecosystem
Going into 2025, Flexera’s business strategy is centered around enhancing its partner ecosystem, particularly with MSPs, to deliver greater value to its customers.
The recent acquisition of NetApp’s FinOps business is a key part of this strategy– focusing on addressing the growing IT spending on cloud and data center services.
“We want maximum value in what we do to reach the end customer and having the partner ecosystem there in the middle helps us extend our reach, not only to reach more companies than we could on our own, but also be able to take insights to a deeper level inside of those companies which, in turn, drives value the company is seeking out of their investments,” said Brian Hibner, senior vice president of alliances and services at Flexera, in a conversation with Channel Insider.
Hibner’s experience– with a background that includes 20 years at Deloitte– informs Flexera’s strategy of being able to do more globally, helping to grow, expand, and transform the financial operations space. Hibner says that Flexera’s interest in the space is informed by the market and that interest from customers is only accelerating.
Recently, the organization released its 2025 IT Priorities Report, which found that 87 percent of IT decision-makers haven’t made managing cloud or applying FinOps practices a top priority in the past 12 months.
“CIOs and CFOs can’t ignore this piece of their tech spend because while data center is being cannibalized by cloud, both are still growing,” said Hibner. “One is not shrinking at the expense of the other. Overall, both sides are still expanding and we believe that there’s a lot of IT team members that are very concerned looking at what they have to do to manage and run the business of today.”
Hibner adds that very concerned about that piece of the puzzle and that’s where they would like to help. What has been found as a key priority for survey respondents in the IT Priorities Report was integrating AI. When it comes to AI spend, we’re just on the beginning cusp of it.
“I’ve heard from a lot of partners in the companies that AI spend is sneaking up on them and it’s scaring them because they have no idea where the ceiling is and how big it could be,” said Hibner. “And that is very central to how we think about technology spend and risk management across a hybrid IT estate.”
AI is a technology that Flexera wants to be able to help organizations optimize as it grows in importance. The enterprise wants to be at the forefront of helping customers handle and manage spend related to AI.
Flexera’s future plans
Flexera will soon be launching a product that helps with cloud spend, called Cloud License Management (CLM). This new product will draw from the software licenses that are being spent as part of a cloud build, predominantly through the marketplace.
“That’s a blind spot to organizations right now– that spend that is not a cloud spend in the traditional sense, it’s not a traditional asset management spend, and is living in both of these worlds,” said Hibner. “In understanding that blind spot, we see a market need to bring that to light and be able to do something with that.”
The general availability of this product will occur by the end of Q1 to help customers better manage their cloud bill.
“We continue to make material increases year-over-year in our portfolio and in our product investment,” Hibner added. “In R&D, hiring engineers, bringing new things to market– we are not slowing down in the least.”
Flexera’s services are in the professional services capacity and Hibner emphasizes that they are not in the business of competing with their partners or MSPs. The focus for Flexera is enabling its partners’ services and capabilities from a delivery standpoint.
“We continue that trend where we want to make our partners wildly successful in their domains, in the professional services space, or service delivery space,” Hibner says. We are really, really good at technology and we want our partners to be really, really good at service delivery. We are here to help you make your customer successful. We’re here to help you make money on the top line and increase your margins on the bottom line through the Flexera platform and tech-enabled services that you’re able to bring to market.”
FinOps helps bring together IT and finance to cloud cost optimization. Read more about why IT and Finance professionals should collaborate to invest in these technologies.