Flexera announced it has completed the acquisition of Spot from NetApp. The acquisition is Flexera's latest step towards offering a comprehensive set of solutions to help organizations confront growing cloud cost and usage hurdles, especially as the consumption of artificial intelligence (AI) surges and strains cloud budgets.

With this acquisition, Flexera expands its leading Cloud Financial Management offering into a suite of AI-powered FinOps technologies and enhances the value of these offerings by expanding its partner ecosystem. This newly bolstered FinOps portfolio from Flexera allows organizations and managed service providers (MSPs) to manage cloud financial commitments, automate billing and invoicing, reduce workload costs and optimize containers. Flexera FinOps aligns with the expanding scope of FinOps to include data centers, SaaS and public cloud, while also supporting enhanced use cases such as software licensing and sustainability.

"The need for FinOps and cloud cost optimization has never been greater, as critical AI initiatives create more urgency for boards and C-suites to effectively contain swelling cloud and IT spend," said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. "We believe that by bringing Spot and its core products into the Flexera FinOps portfolio, we are now the most comprehensive provider in the space. This also complements our leading positions in IT Asset Management and SaaS Management."

The Spot business adds new capabilities to Flexera's FinOps solution with Kubernetes cost management and accelerates innovation in container management, spot cloud instances and commitment management. Spot's main product lines include:

• Spot Eco helps organizations unlock the full value of their cloud services with a series of cloud commitment management features, ensuring organizations capture critical savings from reserved instances, savings plans or committed usage discounts across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• Spot Ocean is a Kubernetes infrastructure management product that provides continuous optimization of containers for cost, performance and availability.
• Spot Elastigroup allows organizations to scale their workloads and maximize the value of their cloud investments with spot instances and virtual machines.
• CloudCheckr is a powerful cloud cost management tool allowing enterprise, MSPs and distributors to manage and reduce cloud costs, optimize resources and gain operational efficiencies, manage billing and invoicing, improve governance, and strengthen security and compliance.

These solutions are accompanied by a robust portfolio of policy-based best practice checks for cost, security, governance and compliance.

"The completion of this transaction further hones our focus of our Public Cloud business. Our highly differentiated first party and marketplace cloud storage services are complemented by intelligent data and operational services such as Data Infrastructure Insights and Instaclustr. These services, in concert with our Hybrid Cloud products, enable customers to build a seamless intelligent data infrastructure across hybrid multi-cloud," said Haiyan Song, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Operations Services, at NetApp. "We believe that Flexera is the right environment for Spot portfolio of solutions, employees and customers to thrive."

Flexera's integration of Spot also creates new opportunities for partners - particularly MSPs and distributors - to develop or enhance their own FinOps services. With Flexera, partners have a chance to tap into a broader portfolio of technologies and specialists, while building value-added services that cover the expanded definition of FinOps to include ITAM and software licensing, SaaS management, AI spend management and more.

"Flexera customers can expect to gain in capabilities and a richer portfolio, such as a whole slew of advanced purchase commitment automation and container cost management and optimization capabilities," wrote Tracy Woo at Forrester in a recent blog post.¹ "The Spot acquisition is a boon for Flexera both in market presence with CloudCheckr's dominant channel presence and with the added capabilities of Spot's Eco (purchase commitments), Elastigroup (spot automation), and Ocean (container management), which all fill major gaps."