Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization - Advanced Technology Partner

What do you like best about the product?

Managing of cost, update Authorize and unauthorize software

What do you dislike about the product?

So far no, everything works fine. Its very helpfull

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

License managing part

What do you like best about the product?

Flexera One consolidates everything I need in one place, making it much easier for me to manage resources. I really appreciate how it offers visibility of software usage, licenses, and cloud costs. The dashboards are incredibly useful for understanding complex data and optimizing licenses, usage, and cloud spending. The license optimization feature is the most valuable part for me. Additionally, the cloud cost insight and reporting tools are very helpful. Overall, the initial setup was quite easy.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some reports and dashboard configurations take extra steps or time, which can be a bit overwhelming due to the sheer amount of data. Better navigation and simpler data presentation would definitely improve the experience.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Flexera One helps us cut down software waste, identify unused licenses, and provides clearer IT visibility. I can manage resources with ease, optimizing license and cloud costs with its dashboards and features.

What do you like best about the product?

We have a lot of clients and run all three clouds. We used to look at costs and licenses separately, which was very confusing. Flexera One brings them together, which I like the most. The CCO part gives advice on rightsizing and tells about reserved instances, the ITAM part identifies license usage. Combining the two gives the whole picture. The automation has made reporting a lot easier.

What do you dislike about the product?

There's nothing particularly bad but there is one thing that bothers me a little. Flexera One is a huge platform, which sometimes takes a long time to find new features. The other small thing is their new AI feature is not as fast as they claim, maybe it will be better in the future. I think no platform is perfect but Flexera is a good partner.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our biggest problem was data fragmentation. AWS, Azure, GCP, all three had separate data, if we had to check the cost of a client, team would sit in three places and still make a difference. Flexera solved this problem, now all clouds are visible on a single dashboard, right sizing and budgeting are much easier than before. The second problem was that we used to take action after the cost increased, now we set alerts in advance and stop it. At Northrop Grumman, our compliance reports are generated very quickly, which is satisfying to clients. I just sometimes wish the interface was a little simpler.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the centralized view that Flexera One provides. It makes day-to-day software management much easier by having everything in one place. The visibility it offers into the software environment is great; it helps us track applications and understand license usage. It's much easier to identify underutilized software and find opportunities to optimize license costs. The centralized reporting and analytics make it simpler to manage renewals and make better licensing decisions based on accurate user data. This all leads to a more efficient software management process, as it reduces the need to gather information manually from different sources.

What do you dislike about the product?

One area that could be improved is the learning curve. Flexera One has a lot of capabilities, so it can take some time to understand all the features and configure the platform effectively. Some reports and workflows could also be more intuitive for new users.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Flexera One helps us maintain accurate software inventory, reduce costs by identifying unused software, and centralize licensing management. It improves our software visibility, enabling better licensing decisions and cost optimization, reducing manual tasks, and simplifying renewal tracking.

What do you like best about the product?

I really appreciate Flexera One for being the gold standard when it comes to tracking IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. It's an officially certified replacement for the IBM License Metric Tool, which is a huge deal for us. It's also been formally verified by Oracle Global Licensing and Advisory Services. Plus, it automates the complex SQL Server core licensing rules for Microsoft, which is incredibly helpful. I also like that Flexera One automatically calculates effective license positions and can generate audit-ready reports, which saves us a lot of headaches. And I love how we can integrate it directly with ServiceNow CMDB to enrich our configuration items with normalization and lifecycle data, making our processes much more seamless. Lastly, even though the initial setup was complex, the integration process was fast, which was a big plus for me.

What do you dislike about the product?

Flexera One works well overall, but it's not plug and play and has onboarding complexity. The initial onboarding is quite heavy and requires significant technical preparation. Deploying the beacon architecture across segmented corporate networks and securing access from the security team takes longer than expected. The initial setup process is complex, although the integration was fast.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Flexera One to manage software deployments and licensing, protect against audits, and centralize hardware data. It automates license calculations and audit reports, and simplifies complex licensing for IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.

What do you like best about the product?

At Cyberscout we have a mix of old on-prem stuff and cloud services and it was always a mess trying to track it all. Flexera pulls it together and shows you what's going on. The license management part is great, we found some duplicates we didn't even know we had. The FinOps piece helps me understand cloud spending better.

What do you dislike about the product?

The onboarding was tougher than I expected. There's so many features that it feels overwhelming at first and I definitely needed some handholding. Customizing reports was not as easy as I hoped, I ended up using the default ones mostly because I couldn't figure out how to tweak them the way I wanted. We also had some trouble pulling data from a couple of our older systems and had to do some manual work arounds. The cost is pretty high too which is always a concern.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used to have no real visibility into our IT assets and it was causing issues with compliance and overspending. Now we have a single dashboard that shows everything from our on-prem servers to our cloud data. It's helped us avoid some potential penalty situations and we've identified licenses we were paying for but not using. The cloud optimization tools let us allocate our budget smarter which is helpful for me when I'm planning new hires.

What do you like best about the product?

When we had a number of business units and wanted to track our software entitlements and infrastructure inventory to a fine degree of accuracy, Flexera’s Technopedia database normalized inconsistent raw data that originated in our hardware, cloud instances, and local devices. Our automated license reconciliation engine also allowed us to easily correlate difficult product use rights, sub-capacity concepts and vendor metrics like IBM PVUs or Oracle DB cores without the use of spreadsheets.

What do you dislike about the product?

Initial set up is definitely a significant hurdle especially if you're getting into custom data connectors, or complex policy settings for older non-standard applications. The UI is occasionally clunky due to how many sub-menus you have to dive through, and occasional minor API rate limits can sometimes hold up bulk dataset exports during busy reporting periods.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Flexera fixes the fragmentation in our IT estate by ingesting all those separate data sources into a unified source of truth, mitigates our audit risk by knowing our actual level of compliance rather than being surprised by multi-millions of dollars in vendor fines, and gives us the visibility to engineer to optimize how we systematically get back from wasted software licenses and overall tech spend.

What do you like best about the product?

I use Flexera One for SAM and license tracking at Ford where I work as an embedded software engineer. It gives a good consolidated view of our deployments which is nice. The normalization helps a lot with reconciliation. Setup went fine and I use it just about everyday. It handles our size pretty well.

What do you dislike about the product?

The dashboards are complex to navigate. I sometimes struggle with generating reports quickly. Filtering is not as flexible as I would like and drill down capabilities feel limited.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It solves tracking and unused license identification. Gives us centralized tracking and compliance visibility. Things that were difficult before are now more manageable which benefits our team overall.

What do you like best about the product?

I like Flexera One because it gives us distinct visibility into our cloud spending and usage, making it much easier to understand our memory expenditure and identify areas for cost optimization. Additionally, having the billing and usage information readily available in one place saves us time during cost reviews or when preparing reports. The centralized reporting and cost analysis provided by Flexera One have been especially useful for our team.

What do you dislike about the product?

One area that could be improved is the overall user experience. Some features can take a little time to understand, especially for new users. The reporting and data views could also be a bit more straightforward and customizable. It would also be helpful if some of the billing and usage data updates were available more quickly, as having more real-time information would make cost tracking and analysis easier.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I mainly use Flexera One to track our cloud usage and spending, providing visibility and helping optimize costs. It centralizes billing data, simplifying report preparation and cost analysis. However, the user experience and real-time data updates could be improved.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

To enhance user experience, consider simplifying the interface and providing more intuitive guides for new users. Improving the speed of data updates and offering more customizable reporting options could also significantly benefit users.

What do you like best about the product?

It provides detailed inventory information through a user-friendly interface, and it integrates easily with other SAM tools. It helps in customer improve their overall SAM performance.

What do you dislike about the product?

Their table lookup functionality feels limited, and when I need to add unrecognized evidence, the timeline is very long.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It helps in preparing the ELPs for major publishers and also acts as audit-ready data for Oracle and IBM. We use custom reports to support internal activities for clients. The Flexera team’s response time is good, and we can choose the urgency level based on our needs.