Dive Brief:
- IBM and Cognizant launched a collaborative FinOps Center of Excellence to help enterprises manage cloud spending, the companies said Wednesday.
- The two technology providers will combine Cognizant’s cloud and developer platforms with IBM software, including Apptio cost optimization tools and Turbonomic application and network performance management solutions, the companies said.
- The move was spurred by the inherent complexity of IT estates, as enterprises add cloud-based microservices like generative AI and build out hybrid multicloud ecosystems, Mike Turner, Cognizant's VP of software and platform engineering, told CIO Dive. “More diversity in infrastructure is a good thing, but it can make it difficult to address governance and control issues,” he said.
Dive Insight:
IBM deepened its bench of hybrid multicloud cost management solutions in the last year.
The company acquired container cost optimization solution Kubecost in September and added HashiCorp’s suite of infrastructure management products to its portfolio in April. Apptio and Turbonomic are also relatively recent additions to IBM's multicloud solutions portfolio.
As cloud strategies mature and consumption drives the global market past $800 billion this year, enterprises are leaning on FinOps practices to rationalize deployments and get the most out of every dollar spent.
Automation and tooling designed to tag and flag spending anomalies and tie costs to specific business functions are a growing part of the FinOps ecosystem, according to S&P Global. The market for FinOps cost visibility and management solutions, which generated $1.6 billion last year, will nearly double to $3 billion in 2028, the research firm expects.
Technology executives are leaning into multicloud to prevent vendor lock-in and allay the cost of provider outages, Turner said. “Most large organizations are going to have more than one provider to avoid concentration risk,” he said. “But it can be quite difficult to see where cloud spend is accumulating when you get into multicloud environments.”
The IBM partnership spans mainframe modernization and AI governance, too. Cognizant will deploy the watsonx Code Assistant for Z and governance solution to shore up hybrid environments and ease AI adoption, according to the announcement.
But mainframe modernization and AI adoption both lead right back into the jaws of cloud spend.
“There’s lots of lift-and-shift cloud workloads and big legacy technology out,” Turner said, “As you move that into a fully cloud-native microservices model, it requires a whole new level of FinOps practices.”
