IBM expands its IAOps capabilities with a new offering announced March 15 that aims to help with IT asset management and software license compliance.
IBM partners with IT asset company Flexera and integrates its software license management and management capabilities with IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management (APM) technology. IBM is also launching the Flexera One with IBM Observability service to help organizations better visualize all software assets in use. The new services are designed to help IT operations better understand and optimize the software assets in use.
The overall goal of AIOps, according to Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM Automation, is to infuse artificial intelligence and automation into all aspects of IT operations.
“With AIOps, we want to embed AI into all pillars of IT operations and turn it into a data-driven predictive methodology,” Nirmal said. ITPro today.
Why IBM Brings AIOps to Software Asset Management
IBM has been very active in recent years to develop its computer operations capabilities. In particular, the company acquired vendors to grow its application observability portfolio.
In 2020, IBM acquired enterprise visibility provider Instanta, which was followed in 2021 by the acquisition of enterprise application resource management provider Turbonomic. What IBM does not have is software asset management technology for tracking software licenses for non-IBM software. This is where Flexera and its software asset management technology comes in.
Flexera’s technology can help identify software compliance issues, ensuring an organization is using the licenses it has acquired, Nirmal said. Software management is not just about on-premises usage, but also software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud applications, which Flexera can help enable.
What IBM has done is create an integration where Flexera software asset management information can be passed to Turbonomic. Using this information, the Turbonomic platform is able to create policies for compliance management and license optimization.
IBM Turbonomic gives users a view into application performance that will now benefit from Flexera’s software asset management functionality.
IBM AIOps optimizes software asset management
Turbonomics integration with Flexera will help enable AIOps, Nirmal said.
For example, the technology will be able to identify whether computing cores are underutilized, he said. If licensed, a policy can be created to optimize compute core usage in a workload deployment. Nirmal said Turbonomic has several AI algorithms to help automate the optimization of resource and license usage in an organization’s IT operations.
The future goal, according to Nirmal, is to apply even more advanced AI capabilities to Flexera’s software asset management data to help with even more optimization. The overall goal of AIOps is to enable the optimization of IT operations through automation and intelligence.
“Blowing AI into data to really bring predictability to it, that’s what I call AIOps,” Nirmal said.