Cloudability d’IBM sort du lot

Alongside Flexera and VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, it is ranked among the market leaders by the analysis firms Gartner and Forrester.

The flexibility and ease of use of cloud services creates a constraint: that of closely monitoring the expenses of each digital asset used. Objective: to avoid seeing a cost slip and exceed the budget allocated initially. This is the domain of finops. In this area, three solutions stand out: Apptio Cloudability (IBM), Flexera and WMware Tanzu CloudHealth (Broadcom). All three are ranked by Gartner and Forrester as leaders. Among them, one clearly stands out: Cloudability.

“The strong point of these three solutions is that they broadly cover all cloud financial management needs. This allows them to respond to the main issues of large companies in this area,” comments Jean Latiere, finops analyst at Sanofi. And Zakia Queiroz, FinOps specialist at Capgemini in France, added: “Following a comparative study that we carried out a few months ago for a client in the cosmetics sector, we were able to see that these three tools were almost identical in terms of functionality.”

As the Gartner quadrant and the Forrester wave show, other market players like Datadog or ServiceNow do not offer such a rich functional palette.

WMware CloudHealth will prove particularly good at covering both public cloud and private cloud issues. “This tool is by construction particularly advanced for managing finops on site (on-premise, ndlr)”, specifies Thomas Sarrazin, global head of the finops offer at Capgemini. An observation which seems logical insofar as WMware has historically made IT cost management one of its specialties. Cloudability will provide recommendations for in-house optimization without simply interfacing with the optimization recommendations of hyperscalers.

Recommendations which can result in the purchase of reserved instances or saving plans (i.e. expenditure commitment contracts of one to three years), but also the shutdown of unused resources or even the adjustment the sizing of machine capacities.

In the area of ​​forecasting and budgeting, IBM's solution is again ahead of its two challengers. Cloudability is also doing well on the sustainability front. In this area, the tool does not just rely on figures from cloud providers, but deploys an open source methodology to calculate its own carbon emission monitoring indicators. When it comes to shared cost allocation, Cloudability remains far ahead here as well. And likewise in terms of ergonomics and ease of use, “Cloudability offers an interface that stands out from the rest for creating dashboards and managing forecasts,” says Thomas Sarrazin at Capgemini.

“Let’s not forget the cloud cost management tools offered by the hyperscalers themselves”

What about coverage for hyperscalers? On this point, Cloudability and Flexera stand out compared to WMware CloudHealth. “Alongside Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, they will be able to extract consumption data from Alibaba Cloud,” underlines Zakia Queiroz at Capgemini. “On the other hand, they will not be able to provide cost optimization recommendations relating to this platform.” The consultant also notes “good technical support” from these two players.

“Cloudability and Flexera will also prove to be very flexible on security issues, where WMware Cloud Health may be a little less so,” adds Zakia Queiroz.

Other market players

Players who have arrived more recently on the market, including Finout or Vantage, will be much less present in on-premise cost management. On the other hand, they are considered very good by the experts interviewed for covering native cloud, in particular Kubernetes cloud cost management. Other differentiating factors for these players: good integration of the Snowflake and Databricks data platforms, platform as a service and software as a service. Finally, the ergonomics of the user interface is often considered impeccable among these players.

“Let’s not forget the cloud cost management tools offered by the hyperscalers themselves, including AWS Trusted Advisor and Azure Cost Management,” recalls Thomas Sarrazin. “Our customers tend to use this type of product to get started, with a small volume of machine capacity.” Last category of solutions: tailor-made dashboard applications based on reporting tools such as Microsoft Power BI, AWS QuickSight or even Google Looker.

What will happen in the future? “Observability and cloud cost management tools are set to converge,” believes Thomas Sarrazin. “This trend will make it possible to make informed cost optimization decisions, in particular by having the assurance that an application will benefit from sufficient resources despite a resizing of its machine capacity.”