IBM AIOps Efforts Grow with Software and Asset Management Compliance

IBM is expanding its AIOps capabilities with a new offering announced on March 15 that aims to help with IT asset management and software license compliance.

IBM is partnering with IT asset firm Flexera and integrating its software licensing and management functionality with the IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management (APM) technology. IBM is also launching the Flexera One with IBM Observability service to help organizations better visualize all the software assets that are in use. The new services are designed to help IT operations better understand and optimize what software assets are in use.

The overall goal with AIOps, according to Dinesh Nirmal, general manager, IBM Automation, is to infuse artificial intelligence and automation into all aspects of IT operations.

"With AIOps we want to bring AI into all the pillars of IT operations and really make it a predictive data-driven methodology," Nirmal told ITPro Today.

Why IBM Is Bringing AIOps to Software Asset Management

IBM has been very active in recent years expanding its IT operations capabilities. In particular, the company has been acquiring vendors to grow its application observability portfolio.

In 2020, IBM acquired enterprise visibility vendor Instanta, which was followed in 2021 by the acquisition of enterprise application resource management vendor Turbonomic. What IBM doesn't have is software asset management technology for tracking software licensing for non-IBM software. That's where Flexera — and its software asset management technology — fits in.

Related:Who Does or Doesn’t Need AIOps Tools?

Flexera's technology can help identify software compliance issues, making sure that an organization is using the licenses that it has acquired, Nirmal said. Software management isn't just about on-premises utilization, but also about cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, which is something that Flexera can help to enable.

What IBM did was create an integration where the Flexera information on software asset management can flow into Turbonomic. With that information, the Turbonomic platform is able to create policies for both compliance management and license optimization.

IBM-Turbonomic

IBM AIOps Optimizes Software Asset Management

Turbonomic integration with Flexera will help to enable AIOps, Nirmal said.

For example, technology will be able to identify if computing cores are underutilized, he said. If licensing allows, a policy can be created to optimize computing core usage across a workload deployment. Nirmal said Turbonomic has multiple AI algorithms to help automate the optimization of resource and license usage across an organization's IT operations.

The future goal, according to Nirmal, is to apply even more advanced AI capabilities to the software asset management data from Flexera to help with even more optimization. The goal with AIOps overall is to help enable optimization of IT operations with automation and intelligence.

"Infusing AI into the data to really drive predictability into it is what I call AIOps," Nirmal said.