Flexera One provides visibility for IT assets, FinOps in a single package

00:00  
Hi everybody, welcome to DEMO, the show where companies come in and they show us their latest products and services. Today, I’m joined by Jonathan Van Horn, he is the director of solution engineering at Flexera. But you go by JVH, so I’m going to be calling you JVH for the rest of the show. So welcome to the show.
 
00:12
I appreciate you having me, Keith.
 
00:14
All right, so what are you going to show us today, and can you tell us a little bit about Flexera as well?
 
00:17
Flexera is the market leader in technology value optimization, and we’ve been in this space for over 30 years. We help organizations answer four critical questions about their entire Hybrid IT environment: What do I have? Where am I at risk? What is it costing me? But more importantly, What value am I getting from the technology investments that I’m making? Today I’m going to show you how Flexera customers are answering those four questions, leveraging Flexera One powered by the technology intelligence platform.
 
00:48
Okay, so Flexera One is relatively new, we’re not going back 30 years to discuss that product. So what is this Flexera One? Who is that mainly designed for? Is it the CIO level? Is it someone in IT operations, security teams, network teams, everybody?
 
01:05
We focus on three key pillars within every organization: technology, finance and security. So CIOs, CFOs, chief procurement officers, even CISOs leverage the value and data that Flexera provides to make that data extensible and drive additional value to key business systems like IT service management, the CMDB, IT financial management, even enterprise architecture, applications and SecOps.
 
01:29
And what problem are you solving? This is the big question: why should a viewer care about watching this video — what problem are you helping them solve? And it can be multiple problems, too, right?
 
01:39
Oh, absolutely. Organizations are sitting on a gold mine of data. The challenge becomes making sense of that data, but then also trusting the data to drive critical business decisions. So our customers are excited about our ability to aggregate these disparate data sources, aggregate, cleanse, normalize, contextualize, and even enrich that data to drive this decision making and provide deep insights using actionable technology intelligence.
 
02:09
What would companies be doing if they didn’t have your platform? I’ve seen other point solutions, perhaps, that that address things like Cloud spend and things like that. So there are other finops programs out there, and there are other IT operations type platforms too. So is it that you’re just combining them into one? Or what’s your your big value proposition?
 
02:31
As they say, the modern technology environments are all about convergence today, and even ITAM and FinOps are converging. This is made true by even analysts like Gartner and Forrester, who are saying that it is monumentally critical for organizations to manage this convergence. And it’s even been more proven out by the 2024 State of the Cloud report, where managing software licenses in a cloud environment is the number six initiative across all IT leaders — that’s up three spots and 32% in the last two years alone. So Flexera is not only the market leader here, but we are uniquely positioned to help organizations manage that convergence of ITAM and Finops to drive critical strategic business value.
 
03:17
So let’s get into the demo.
 
03:18
Excellent. So we’re going to start with the problem I talked about earlier, aggregating all of these disparate data sources. This is what Flexera does. This is fundamentally the challenge that organizations have, taking these disparate data sources, aggregating them together, cleansing, normalizing, enriching and contextualizing this data. The only way this is possible is through technology that Flexera provides, called Technopedia. It is the world’s gold standard for IT asset data, and we have dedicated employees who consistently populate this 4,500 times every single day. So what organizations are able to do with that information, very quickly they can identify their entire hybrid IT estate, so understanding what the hardware is, what the software is in their environment, but also contextualizing with, ‘Hey, what is the carbon footprint of the technology investments I’m making? What security advisories are tied to these individual pieces of technology that are potentially opening up my organization for risk?’
 
We also contextualize and enrich it with currency, information, understanding, end of life, end of support, obsolescence. These are things where the manufacturers are no longer supporting these applications, rendering them vulnerable. The other piece to it is, what do I have and bringing contextualization is we also can then tie the individual technical components to the specific offerings and business services that these companies are providing their customers. So being able to take a look at every business service, seeing the technology that’s supporting it, understanding the vulnerabilities and the contextualization around lifecycle currency is critical to achieving efficiency and effective management of these services. Now that’s the “What do I have? Where am I at risk?” As far as “What is it costing me?”, we provide an aggregated view of every piece of technology spend, everything from on-premise licenses, SaaS and cloud in one standardized view. So you can see exactly where those dollars are going from those investment perspectives. Then we take it even further by understanding the value that I’m getting. So now you can start to see from a FinOps perspective, bringing the cost and the risk aspects to these insights, understanding exactly where my dollars are being spent across the organization, understanding the potential license risk associated with it, and then also driving deeper insights. So I can see here, if I take a look at this new service we just released as an organization here, smart personal assistant, everybody’s trying to incorporate AI into the services that they provide being first to market, I can see that I have some compliance risk. I have spend in the cloud. I have spend that’s in SaaS. I have total technology spend here, and finance is driving a lot of this through the cloud. Well, what can I start to do with it? Well, Flexera makes this information actionable, so I can quickly go into and see that I have over half a million dollars in potential savings that is made possible by the observations and the suggestions that Flexera is bringing to the customer. Now
 
06:29
Now you’ve got 250 recommendations and 852 recommendations. Is someone going to go through all of those and look at those? Or is it more of an aggregate type of recommendation?
 
06:40
It’s a great question, yeah, so we bring the insights and make it visible to the organization, right? But then that needs to be taken into the organization’s process. Who is responsible for that? And that’s what we do. We provide the insights that help drive govern the business decisions, and if there are gaps in that process, we help bring light to that.
 
06:59
And the same thing on the vulnerability page, I think you had, you had read to indicate, oh, this could be a problem, but you can dig a little bit deeper into that than just that dashboard view, right?
 
07:09
Absolutely. Not only can we dig deeper, but as I mentioned before, we can make this data extensible to other critical business systems, like an IT service management Pro platform.
 
07:19
So do you have integrations with other platforms that companies might be using to make your platform work with all of these other platforms?
 
07:26
Absolutely. So not only is the data extensible, but we have deep integrations with these critical business systems to make the data extensible and then drive those processes to mitigate the risk.
 
07:38
Okay, and do you offer a free trial, or a free version for people to try out?
 
07:45
We have all kinds of assessments that are available. The key is, we want to understand what the organization is trying to solve. What are those key business outcomes, and then we leverage the technology components that are going to support those specific and strategic initiatives and make that available.
 
07:59
And is it relatively easy to install? I’m assuming this is all SaaS-based.
 
08:04
It is all SaaS-based. Very easy to implement. Deliveries, very quick. The screen that I showed you previously around the normalization, this is done in a matter of hours. Trying to aggregate all that together. We can do it in a matter of hours.
 
08:20
And you’ve shown me just a few of the features. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of other cool features to this product. Where can people go for more details and information?
 
08:29
You can go and check out everything on flexera.com.
 
08:32
JVH, again, thank you for showing us the demo of Flexera One.
 
08:36
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Keith.
 
08:38
That’s all the time we have for today’s show. Be sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, add any thoughts you have below. Join us every week for new episodes of DEMO. I’m Keith Shaw, thanks for watching.