For the third consecutive year, Flexera has received the ComponentSource Top 50 Publisher Award and the Top 100 Product Award for AdminStudio.

As the world’s largest marketplace for reusable software components and development tools, ComponentSource has played a key role in our software journey. Their platform has helped support our mission of delivering industry-leading application management solutions by delivering our solutions to organizations around the globe. These awards are an important reflection of the strong collaboration and shared commitment we have with our longstanding, valued partner and to our customers.

“These ComponentSource Awards show that when our customers have complex application packaging, management, and installation needs, they often turn to Flexera’s AdminStudio to simplify and streamline the process,” said Sam Patterson, CEO ComponentSource. “Congratulations to Flexera on the awards and for 25 years of AdminStudio!” 

Receiving the Top 100 Product Award for AdminStudio is particularly gratifying this year as we celebrate 25 years of AdminStudio in 2025. Flexera is committed to building solutions that matter. What began as a repackaging tool for converting legacy setups into MSI packages is now a comprehensive application management solution. AdminStudio now supports the full application lifecycle, from repackaging and testing to deployment, and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft SCCM, VMware Workspace ONE and Microsoft Intune.

Our customer-centric approach—driven by support teams, product engineers and community engagement—ensures AdminStudio will continue to evolve in step with the needs of IT professionals.

Every feature and enhancement has been shaped by the real-world insights of the IT professionals who use it every day. Their input continues to guide our roadmap and ensure we deliver real value where it matters most.  As we look ahead, we remain focused on continuous innovation and bringing smarter automation, deeper integrations and enhanced security to help enterprises deploy applications with confidence.

Thank you to ComponentSource, our partners and customers for your continued support. You’ve helped shape AdminStudio into the powerful solution it is today.

FinOps X 2025 is almost here, helping practitioners’ skills and networks blossom. This year includes several exciting sessions that dive into the new FinOps Scopes and Cloud Sustainability.

In a recent Earth Day blog, we shared the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report, which indicates that cloud sustainability initiatives are top-of-mind. Over half (57%) of respondents indicated they either have, or plan to have a defined sustainability initiative with cloud carbon footprint tracking in place within twelve months.

But the buzz doesn’t stop there. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their Framework to include Scopes, a concept that outlines how FinOps practices can be applied to areas of technology spending beyond cloud infrastructure. This update points to the cross-pollination needed across FinOps, IT asset management (ITAM) and DevOps teams to ensure that all technology spending supports business goals.

At FinOps X 2025, we’ll share how the Flexera One portfolio, now with Spot, makes it easier for these teams to find value together. Visit us at the Expo in Booth 4 to learn more about the intersection of FinOps, ITAM and cloud sustainability. Talk with experts and get a demo to see how Flexera One is the only solution that breaks down data silos to give everyone in your organization visibility and control over the cost and carbon footprint of your entire IT estate.

Early access for Flexera One Cloud Sustainability

Flexera is bringing more sunshine to cloud sustainability with the early access release of new cloud sustainability capabilities within Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO).  If you’re a current customer or partner using CCO, you’re invited to join our early access program for Flexera One Cloud Sustainability. Reach out at msp@flexera.com to join today.

Flexera One Cloud Sustainability is the only solution with ISO 14064-certified data for Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting. This enables your customers to meet regulatory requirements for lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously optimizing cloud usage and cost. With unique capabilities for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, it provides:

• Carbon footprint visibility
  A multi-cloud dashboard provides resource-level visibility into key metrics, including carbon emissions, water consumption and electricity usage.
• Actionable recommendations
  Data-driven recommendations simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and optimize cloud costs through rightsizing, scheduling and strategic workload placement.
• Regulatory reporting and audit readiness
  Customizable reports align with sustainability frameworks to simplify audit, compliance and internal stakeholder communications.

Mark Bradley, Flexera Senior Product Manager, is leading this release. Because Mark is such a passionate advocate for cloud sustainability, I took a moment to ask him a few questions:

Q: Mark, given the recent changes to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in the EU, what are you hearing from customers and partners about corporate sustainability initiatives?

A: There have been some delays to deadlines around the CSRD and efforts to simplify the requirements, which give organizations in the EU more time to establish sustainability initiatives and reporting structures. But the goals remain the same, and we still expect requirements will be enacted in due time. Enterprises with data in the EU will need to report first, and it’s likely we will see other countries follow suit. Our customers and partners across the globe are preparing now to meet not just government regulations, but also their own internal goals for reducing carbon emissions from their technology usage.

Q: With the new FinOps Framework’s Scopes, what insights can you share about how FinOps and DevOps teams can build a more cost-efficient, sustainable future together?

A: FinOps, DevOps and cloud sustainability have much overlap, as all these teams seek to optimize the usage of technology estates. This effort often has the welcome effect of reducing cost and carbon emissions.  With the recent acquisition of Spot, Flexera is uniquely positioned to help these teams collaborate to achieve their common goals by integrating cost, usage and carbon data in Flexera One.

Q: Many organizations rely on technology partners to help them on their FinOps and sustainability journeys, so what should people look for in a partner, if maturing these capabilities is important to them?

A: Building a cost-efficient and sustainable IT strategy requires the right knowledge, the right data and the right tools. Organizations should look for a partner who can bring not only their cloud and carbon data, but also their SaaS, licensing, and on-premises cost and usage data together in a single interface for one complete picture of their environment. This partner should also have experience helping enterprises navigate the constant changes associated with cloud usage and sustainability regulations.

Learn more about Flexera at FinOps X

If you’re going to FinOps X 2025 in San Diego, let’s connect!  We’d love to meet for a private session or an informal chat at our booth.

Stop by booth 4 to see Flexera One Cloud Sustainability in action, and talk with experts about how Flexera integrates data across on-premises and cloud environments to give you true hybrid and multi-cloud visibility and control.

You can also learn more about Flexera One by joining our customers’ sessions:

Join our Sustainability breakout session at FinOps X

For a deep dive into Flexera One Cloud Sustainability, join Mark Bradley and our sustainability data partner, Greenpixie, for a breakout session: Drive Cost Savings with GreenOps Data

What you’ll learn:

As the global push for sustainability meets rising economic pressures, organizations are re-evaluating their sustainability initiatives —and what they cost—in 2025. In this landscape, cloud teams face a complex challenge: build and run highly performant applications that further business objectives, drive measurable revenue and meet global standards for environmental impact.

Cloud providers are beginning to deliver data around Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, but latency and lack of granularity make this data difficult to act on. Engineers and FinOps practitioners need to see sustainability metrics side-by-side cost data to understand the business impact of GreenOps, ESG teams need reliable data that is ISO certified and meets CSRD standards for reporting.

This session shows how Greenpixie and Flexera are bringing this data together to make the impossible, possible. Learn how business goals and cloud sustainability intersect, particularly through the lens of FinOps practices and see a demo on how your organization can strike the right balance between compliance, cost and conscience.

Add to your event agenda: Tuesday, June 3, 2:00 – 2:45 p.m. PT at the Flexera Stage (Marina Ballroom E).

We hope to see you there!

In the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the subsequent licensing changes, many organizations are exploring alternative virtualization platforms. Nutanix has emerged as a viable option, offering robust solutions for modern IT infrastructures. To support this transition, Flexera has added a new capability to its IT Asset Management platform: the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) VM inventory collector.

Nutanix Prism is the management interface for Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). It provides a single pane of glass to manage virtual machines, storage, networking and clusters. Nutanix Prism simplifies IT operations with features like performance monitoring, capacity planning and automation—all in a user-friendly dashboard.

Nutanix AHV is Nutanix’s native hypervisor, built into its platform and based on open-source KVM. It’s tightly integrated with Nutanix Prism, allowing seamless VM lifecycle management, high availability and security.

Flexera’s new Nutanix AHV inventory collector lets Nutanix users find and track the relationships between VMs and hosts on Nutanix servers managed by Nutanix Prism.

Navigating the post-VMware landscape

Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023 led to significant shifts in VMware’s licensing model. The company changed from perpetual licenses to subscription-only models. It also increased the minimum core purchase requirement from 16 to 72 cores. Later, the company started sending letters to users with expired support contracts. The letters asked them to remove any updates or patches they had put in after the contract expired, except for critical zero-day security fixes. This enforcement, coupled with substantial price increases—some reports indicate up to a 300% hike—has led to customer reevaluations of virtualization strategies, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses.

Nutanix has responded by offering a special migration promotion until July 31, 2025, that helps organizations move from VMware. This promotion includes one year of free Nutanix licensing and migration services, aiming to minimize operational costs during the transition.

Flexera’s new integration with Nutanix

Alongside the industry’s shift toward alternative virtualization platforms, Flexera has enhanced its IT Asset Management platform by adding support for Nutanix Prism and AHV. This new feature enables organizations to discover and inventory virtual machines hosted on Nutanix servers managed by Nutanix Prism.

Key features:

• Comprehensive inventory collection: Flexera’s IT Asset Management now collects detailed information on Nutanix VM infrastructure, including clusters, pools and hosts, as well as software inventory installed on virtual machines.
• License compliance positioning: With the collected data, organizations can generate a license compliance position for VM-Host and Host-Cluster relationships managed by Nutanix Prism.
• Integration requirements: A minimum version of FlexNet Beacon 23.4.0 is required to use this feature. The ndtrack component is used for software inventory collection, which can be installed locally or run remotely from the appropriate inventory beacon.

Strategic advantages for IT Asset Management

The integration of Nutanix Prism and AHV into Flexera’s IT Asset Management platform offers several strategic benefits:

• Enhanced visibility: Organizations gain a unified view of their virtual environments, facilitating better decision-making and resource allocation.
• Improved compliance: Accurate inventory data helps you comply with licensing agreements, reducing the risk of audits and associated penalties.
• Streamlined operations: The ability to manage and monitor Nutanix environments within the existing IT Asset Management framework simplifies operations and reduces administrative overhead.

As the virtualization landscape evolves, organizations must adapt to maintain operational efficiency and compliance. Flexera’s new ability to collect inventory data from Nutanix Prism and AHV environments helps organizations handle this change well. By leveraging this integration, you can ensure accurate asset management and maintain compliance.

Interested in how Flexera can help you manage your Nutanix VMs? Schedule a personalized demo today.

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As someone who’s been immersed in cybersecurity for years, I couldn’t help but take a hard look at the findings in Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report. While the report covers a multitude of issues, one of the more startling findings is the growth in exploited software vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are no longer a minor afterthought; they’re swiftly becoming a primary entry point for cyberattacks.

A rise in exploited vulnerabilities

According to the report, exploitation of vulnerabilities has now become an initial access vector in about 20% of all breaches—a figure that nearly rivals long-used credential abuse. What’s even more alarming is that this is a 34% increase over last year. These numbers aren’t just statistics; they’re a wake-up call. Attackers aren’t waiting for a perfect moment—they’re actively hunting for any software or system weakness, whether that weakness is in the code itself or in the way edge devices and VPNs are managed.

The edge devices and VPN vulnerability surge

The report also notes that attackers are increasingly leveraging vulnerabilities in edge devices and VPNs. The percentage of exploitation actions targeting these areas has increased from 3% last year to a staggering 22% this year—a nearly eightfold increase. This isn’t just about a single, poorly patched router or misconfigured firewall; it signals a broader industry challenge with managing and patching software on devices that form the front door to our networks.

Yet the report paints a mixed picture. While a lot of effort goes into patching these vulnerabilities, only about 54% of them were reported as fully remediated over the year. And even then, it took organizations a median of 32 days to get patches in place. These delays are too long in today’s threat landscape. Attackers don’t wait—they exploit these gaps of opportunity immediately.

The role of zero-day exploits

Another factor fueling this surge is the use of zero-day exploits—those vulnerabilities that are unknown to the vendor until an attack occurs. It’s both frightening and fascinating to see how these zero-days are being weaponized, particularly against edge and VPN software. In many ways, the exploitations described in the report underscore just how critical it is for organizations to ramp up proactive vulnerability management practices.

What can we do about this rise in vulnerability?

When software vulnerabilities continue to grow as an attack vector, it means that patch management and vulnerability scanning can no longer be side projects when you have the time. Proactive vulnerability management needs to be an integral part of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. If a company is still patching systems on a wait-and-see basis, it’s essentially giving attackers a green light to probe, test and eventually breach the system.

These new findings from Verizon reinforce the need to invest robustly in automated patch management tools, frequent vulnerability assessments and even adopting zero-trust architectures. The faster we can identify—and remediate—these vulnerabilities, the more we can disrupt the attack chain that many cybercriminals rely on.

The Verizon 2025 DBIR reminds us that software vulnerabilities are not static; they’re evolving alongside our technology and threat landscape. One unpatched vulnerability can have a cascade effect on an entire organization. All stakeholders—from IT teams to executive leadership—should take these figures seriously.

Let’s commit to reducing that 32-day median patching time, implementing tighter controls on edge and VPN devices, and staying one step ahead of threat actors who are relentlessly exploiting every gap in our digital armor.

Learn more about the latest vulnerabilities in the Flexera Monthly Vulnerability Insights Report.

Whether you’re a “startup.ai” or an “enterprise.com”, operating cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers compelling advantages, especially in data analytics, machine learning, and Kubernetes-native operations.

However, compared to first-mover AWS and enterprise-first Azure, GCP presents unique challenges. While some are a mere result of GCP being younger, others stem from a different logic applied to some GCP services (like IAM and networking) and savings mechanisms, like commitments.

Since 2019, Spot Eco has been helping thousands of enterprises to maximize their commitment savings and keep their portfolio flexible for change. Through the years, GCP customers have been a brave minority. But today, as the platform matures into the ultimate cloud-native choice, we foresee a surge in GCP adoption. On this ground, we are happy to announce Eco’s new GCP dashboard, and a widened list of supported GCP services.

Google Cloud commitments: One heck of a hard nut

A particularly unique challenge for GCP users lies in managing Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) and Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs). While these GCP-specific discount plans can lead to significant savings, they also introduce complexities that are not present in AWS or Azure commitments, including:

• Rigid resource binding
  GCP CUDs are tightly bound to specific instance families, regions, and resource types (e.g., vCPU and memory for N2 instances in a specific region). If your workload shifts or your team adopts new machine types (e.g., from N1 to N2), the CUDs become partially or fully unusable. AWS, by contrast, offers Compute Savings Plans that automatically apply across instance families, operating systems, and even regions, offering much more flexibility.
• No convertible or exchangeable commitments
  Unlike AWS Convertible Reserved Instances or Azure Reserved Instance Exchanges, GCP offers no official way to modify or cancel commitments mid-term. This lack of flexibility can result in sunk costs, especially for organizations in dynamic environments that frequently change workloads or machine types.
• Forecasting and optimization tooling
  GCP’s forecasting tools, including its Recommender API, are still behind AWS’s Cost Explorer or Azure’s Cost Management solutions. For organizations with bursty or seasonal workloads, this makes it harder to confidently commit to long-term discounts without risking waste.
• SUDs vs CUDs interactions
  GCP automatically applies Sustained Use DiscountsSUDs when VM instances run for a significant portion of the month. While helpful for cost control, these discounts can complicate the decision to purchase CUDs, since the savings from CUDs must be evaluated in the context of discounts you would already receive via SUDs.
• No resell or marketplace options
  Both AWS and Azure do not currently support reselling unused Reserved Instances, but Azure does offer limited refund and exchange policies. GCP offers no such mechanism. Once a CUD is purchased, there is no option to cancel, transfer, or resell it, even if it becomes misaligned with your usage patterns.

Spot Eco for GCP: More savings, less overcommitment

Why do GCP users choose Eco?

Eco overcomes the inherent CUD challenges of GCP users, offering significant advantages over self-management. These advantages help increase actual CUD savings—and give you back the engineering time once invested in managing them:

• Deep knowledge of Google’s FinOps logic and commitment models across compute, data, and application services, ensures the highest possible discounts, with enough wiggle room for your shifting needs.
• Unique, per-user portfolio blend of resource, spend, and flex CUDs keeps ROI high, even when usage patterns change.
• Tiered CUD purchasing and extensions provide flexibility over time in committed spend and resources, while locking the same great discounts for you.
• Regular monitoring of actual CUD utilization allows Eco to add and extend CUDs for increased workload coverage or shift CUDs

What’s new in ECO for GCP?

On the new Eco dashboard, Eco and GCP users can view and analyze the performance of their CUD and SUD portfolio. Key metrics already presented are monetary savings and remaining commitment value by time, region, and GCP service.

Where can I save with Eco for GCP?

Eco helps you with GCP rate optimization, far beyond compute. Some key services managed by Eco include:

• Compute Engine CUDs
• GKE CUDs
• Cloud Run CUDs
• AlloyDB CUDs
• App Engine configurations

Join Eco

Onboarding your Google account is a simple, self-service process, as seen in this video:

Once onboarded, Eco analyzes your current resource usage and composes your unique, distributed blend of CUDs. Once implemented, Eco tracks actual utilization to add, extend, or shift CUDs around your different organizations.

Don’t want to go it alone? Watch the Eco demo or claim your free commitment consultancy here.

In an era defined by rapid technological advancement, enterprises require powerful, secure and environmentally responsible solutions capable of handling intensive AI workloads. IBM LinuxONE 5 stands at the forefront of this mission transforming how businesses optimize IT operations, secure critical infrastructure and pursue sustainability objectives. Our Kubernetes/OpenShift inventory agent support is readily available for IBM zSystems z/VM and KVM virtualization and we’re also proud to offer comprehensive software asset management support for IBM’s new LinuxOne 5 servers, ensuring that no matter how robust and complicated your environment is, Flexera One will be the platform to help ensure you maintain license compliance and optimize your costs as efficiently as possible.

Complex engineering for powerful AI workloads

IBM LinuxONE 5 marks a paradigm shift in AI computing, purpose-engineered to excel under the demanding workloads of today’s enterprises. Powered by advanced Telum II processors, the platform facilitates sophisticated AI modeling, delivering exceptional predictive accuracy and optimized analytics. Its built-in AI acceleration enables enterprises to effortlessly scale intensive AI applications, significantly reducing latency and operational costs. The upcoming Spyre accelerator (available Q4 2025) will further enhance real-time inferencing directly within transactional workflows, pushing the boundaries of enterprise AI even further.

We provide unmatched visibility into your IBM LinuxONE 5 infrastructure, including detailed insights into hardware resource partitioning. This capability helps you identify underutilized assets and supports informed optimization decisions, allowing you to maximize your IBM LinuxONE 5 investments while significantly enhancing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Sustainability as a strategic advantage

IBM demonstrates clear leadership in environmental sustainability with IBM LinuxONE 5. This advanced platform significantly reduces carbon emissions through energy-efficient computing and optimized data center consolidation. Organizations leveraging IBM LinuxONE 5 can substantially cut energy use, physical footprint and operational expenses, seamlessly aligning IT strategies with broader corporate sustainability targets without sacrificing performance or availability.

Additionally, by utilizing the Flexera One platform, you can see carbon comparisons, electricity output and water usage of your existing IT and how much you can benefit from switching to the new IBM LinuxONE 5 family of products.

Comprehensive, end-to-end cybersecurity

With cybersecurity threats growing increasingly sophisticated, IBM LinuxONE 5 offers groundbreaking protection including quantum-safe encryption aligned with NIST standards. The platform integrates confidential computing with accelerated encryption, effectively safeguarding sensitive data, AI models and mission-critical applications. IBM’s comprehensive encryption approach provides scalable and unified protection, complete with robust lifecycle management of encryption keys across both on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

Furthermore, scanning your IBM LinuxONE 5 software hosted on the platform with Flexera’s Software Vulnerability Manager will ensure that there’s no dangerous gap between the time third-party software vulnerabilities are disclosed and when they’re identified and patched. Software Vulnerability Manager leverages industry-leading insights from Secunia Research providing more granular matching of build-level versions of software in your normalized inventory within ITAM.

Flexera’s leading ITAM, IT visibility and security management

Flexera amplifies the value of IBM LinuxONE 5 through advanced IT asset management and vulnerability management capabilities. Flexera One delivers in-depth software inventory, EOL/EOS data, continuous software vulnerability assessments with our software vulnerability manager, and optimized licensing tailored explicitly for IBM environments. Enterprises gain unparalleled visibility and control of their software estates, ensuring proactive management, streamlined compliance, rapid vulnerability remediation and significant cost optimization.

IBM + Flexera: A superior combination

Our strategic collaboration with IBM provides you with an unparalleled competitive edge. Combining IBM’s robust infrastructure, advanced AI and security innovations with Flexera’s market-leading ITAM solutions creates an unmatched enterprise-grade offering. Organizations adopting this powerful partnership are well positioned to leverage cutting-edge AI, maintain rigorous compliance standards, optimize software expenditures and meet ambitious sustainability goals effectively.

IBM LinuxONE 5 and Flexera empower you to achieve smarter, more secure, cost-effective and environmentally conscious IT operations, paving the way for confident leadership in an AI-driven future.

Discover today how Flexera One ITAM can improve your IBM licensing needs.

SCHEDULE A DEMO

Companies everywhere are turning their attention to incorporating AI into their businesses. Unfortunately, a lot of this AI implementation has been lackluster at best, and hit bottom lines with extreme expenses at worst. That’s because the implementation of these AI tools has been a hammer looking for a nail. That is to say, organizations have a solution ready in AI; they just haven’t pinpointed the problem that it solves.

Flexera has taken a slower, more methodical approach to pursuing AI capabilities: looking first at the problem that AI can help solve and then investing our time and energy into solving it. So, what’s the first problem Flexera wants to help you tackle with AI?

Purchase data and entitlement ingestion.

While completely necessary for any SAM practice, uploading purchase data is incredibly time-consuming, can require a team of employees for data entry, and is often prone to human error. That’s where Flexera’s new ITAM entitlement ingestion feature comes in.

How can I upload purchase orders?

Flexera One ITAM enables you to import purchase data from multiple sources. You’ve already been able to upload the following types:

• Standard: The standard template for purchase upload. You can add purchase data into the template and upload it to ITAM
• IBM Passport Advantage: Upload a detailed purchase history report downloaded from IBM Passport Advantage
• Microsoft License Statement: Upload your Microsoft License Statement directly into Flexera One ITAM

And now, with the new AI feature included in Flexera One ITAM, you can:

• Document (AI Recognition): Upload an original purchase order, invoice or order document in .pdf, .jpg/jpeg, .bmp, .tiff or .png format

This incredible new feature allows you to automatically ingest multiple new purchase data documents without manually inputting the data. New purchase orders created this way will be appended with an AI tag.

How does Flexera’s new AI entitlement ingestion work?

Customers utilizing Flexera One ITAM will now have access to a new purchase order upload type called Document (AI Recognition) under the Data Collection > Data Imports section of the Flexera One interface.

This new upload type uses AI recognition to scan over your uploaded purchase data and automatically create new purchase order documents for each line item included. In these newly created purchase order documents, you’ll notice all the pertinent information has been filled in for you, such as the purchase order number, purchase date, vendor name, description of item, purchase quantity information, item cost, and most importantly, the SKU information—including if it’s available in our SKU library. 

New purchase orders created using the AI entitlement ingestion feature will also have the original purchase data document attached for reference. This is a convenient way to reconcile any fields that you feel were calculated erroneously and manually update those fields with the correct information, if necessary.

Purchase orders without SKUs will also be created, helping you categorize expenses for line items such as professional services.

Why is this so valuable?

So why is Flexera’s AI entitlement ingestion feature such a big deal? Imagine you have several purchase data documents, each with dozens of line items with separate SKU numbers, pricing information, descriptions of the items, etc. Manually inputting all this information would take several hours, if not days. The manual process is also prone to human error. Now, instead of just several documents, imagine you have tens of thousands of these records, as is common for large enterprises. Inputting all of that data would take an entire team of people working together. Worse yet, the alternative—not inputting this data—leads to a less accurate ITAM environment with decreased potential for optimization.

Cut down on the countless hours of data entry prone to user error and use Flexera’s AI entitlement ingestion feature included in Flexera One ITAM. Ingest multiple purchase data documents at once and create purchase order documents automatically from that data.

Still not convinced?

Schedule a demo today to see how much time you can save with AI purchase data and entitlement ingestion.

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Our customers are doing incredible work every day to optimize their technology spend, reduce risk and drive smarter decision-making. For the past four years, the Technology Intelligence Awards, presented by Flexera, have recognized the best of the best. The prestigious program recognizes your achievements grounded in real outcomes, measurable impact and strategic innovation across ITAM, FinOps, SaaS Management and Sustainability.

Whether you and your team have optimized software spend, implemented FinOps best practices, improved SaaS visibility and/or achieved environmental gains, your story deserves recognition.

New in 2025: To give your achievements even greater credibility, we’ve invited independent industry analysts and practitioners to review submissions, so your contributions receive the best-in-class recognition they deserve.

Have questions? Need any help drafting your submission? Reach out to customerprograms@flexera.com or book a 30-minute call here to stay ahead of the May 9 submission deadline.

3 reasons to apply for a 2025 Technology Intelligence Award

1. Increase your recognition—both internally and externally
   Elevate your team’s achievements in front of executives and industry peers alike. A nomination puts your work on the radar of decision-makers inside your organization and an external, independent judging panel.
2. Strengthen stakeholder alignment
   Turning your project into an award submission creates a shared victory for everyone involved. It rallies colleagues around your success, secures broader executive buy-in and turns individual wins into team momentum.
3. Boost your professional brand
   Leverage your award story as proof of impact. Use it to power performance reviews, enhance your LinkedIn profile and open doors to future opportunities.

Meet the 2025 Technology Intelligence Awards judges

Picture your accomplishments evaluated by the very architects of our industry’s best practices:

Martin Thompson
As the founder of The ITAM Forum and The ITAM Review, Martin’s two decades of ITAM leadership have shaped how organizations govern assets, streamline processes and drive operational excellence.

Mark Butcher
Founder of Posetiv and a GreenOps trailblazer, Mark advises global enterprises on slashing digital carbon emissions and hitting ambitious net-zero goals.

Karyn Price
An Industry Principal at Frost & Sullivan and member of its AI Center of Excellence, Karyn blends planet-class technical expertise with razor-sharp business strategy to spot tomorrow’s trends today.

FinOps Judge—Coming soon
We’re adding another heavyweight in cloud financial management. Stay tuned for the announcement and get ready to showcase your cloud optimization wins.

Top questions, answered

“I don’t have time for a lengthy application.” A time-consuming application process shouldn’t be a barrier to you getting recognized for your impact. We’ve designed the process to take about an hour.

“Is my story award-worthy?” Absolutely. Whether you’ve driven incremental savings, tamed SaaS sprawl, or launched innovative automations, our judges have the industry know-how to look for real-world impact. Often, the most compelling stories are about steady, meaningful progress.

“Can I keep vendor names or metrics confidential?” These awards exist to recognize your impact and share your story, to the degree you are comfortable sharing. You can share sensitive details without naming vendors, and our awards team will respect any specific confidentiality requirements.

Find your fit: This year’s award categories

If your work touches on optimization, visibility, innovation or sustainability, you’re probably doing award-worthy work. Still unsure? Here’s a breakdown of categories to help guide your choice (don’t feel limited to just one—apply for multiple categories that are relevant to your project):

• Impact of the Year: Recognizing teams that made broad, organization-wide gains—cost savings, efficiency boosts or strategic insights
• Innovation of the Year: Recognizing the most creative uses of Flexera solutions—from automation scripts to custom analytics dashboards
• ITAM Excellence: Recognizing the teams with the sharpest asset governance, risk reduction and spend optimization
• SaaS Management Excellence: Recognizing teams that tamed the SaaS chaos in their organizations, with effective controls on SaaS subscriptions, vendor relationships and budget leakage
• FinOps Excellence: Recognizing FinOps leaders who improved cloud-cost governance, cross-team collaboration and financial accountability
• Technology for Good: Recognizing organizations powered by Flexera who drove sustainability wins, carbon-reduction initiatives or social-impact programs
• Rookie of the Year: Recognizing customers who implemented Flexera in May 2024 or later and have already delivered measurable impact

Ready to tell your story?

Rally your team, prepare your submissions, and submit your nomination(s) by May 9, 2025, to let experts shine a spotlight on your team’s transformative impact. You’ve turned strategy into results—now it’s time to seize your opportunity to lead the conversation. Don’t pass up your chance to be recognized.

Apply today

Managing Kubernetes on Azure at scale involves a lot of busy work, from chasing the latest AKS patch versions (a tedious, brainless task) to best-using reservations and savings plans (an inhumanly complex data challenge).

Spot Ocean for AKS is purpose-built to deliver efficiency at an enterprise scale. Now introducing intelligent commitment-aware autoscaling and auto-upgrades for AKS control plane patch versions, we’re taking low-touch Azure infrastructure management to the next level. Here’s a first peek at these powerful new additions.

Autoscaling on commitments: High performance at lower costs

Azure’s commitment-based pricing—Savings Plans and Reservations—can drastically lower compute costs. But fluctuating workloads often lead to underutilized commitments and wasted potential.

Ocean solves this challenge by dynamically optimizing resource usage in real-time, ensuring your purchased commitments are used wherever needed and possible. Here’s how:

1. Prioritized commitment usage

Ocean intelligently prioritizes your existing Azure commitments during scaling events, reducing reliance on on-demand or spot VMs. This helps you keep your cloud budget in check without compromising availability.

2. Real-time reversion

If Ocean launches a spot VM due to a lack of available commitments, it continuously monitors the environment and will automatically switch back to using your reserved capacity once available—ensuring optimal usage at all times.

3. Dynamic reallocation

Underutilized commitments in one workload (e.g., a Stateful instance group) can be reallocated to another (like an Ocean AKS cluster) where they’ll deliver more value. Spot’s platform identifies these opportunities and adjusts resource allocation dynamically.

4. Granular control for AKS

Spot Ocean offers fine-grained reservation usage control at the virtual node group (VNG) level, allowing teams to target specific workloads with commitments. This level of flexibility makes it easier to tailor resource allocation to your infrastructure strategy.

Spotlight: Real customer use case

Our customer is a mid-sized SaaS company working predominantly in Azure. Providing analytics solutions, many of its mission-critical workloads are stateful and fault-sensitive. That’s why it used Spot Ocean to run a combination of spot VMs and on-demand compute. With this new update, they seamlessly integrate their Azure Savings Plans across stateful VM and AKS environments. As a result, their on-demand consumption is near zero.

During a recent traffic surge amid a new product launch, Ocean automatically scaled out workloads using spot VMs to meet increased demand. Simultaneously, it identified underutilized Savings Plans and dynamically reassigned them to cover eligible on-demand workloads—cutting costs without requiring manual intervention.

Ocean then reverted workloads back to reservations once the traffic stabilized. This end-to-end automation saved the company time, improved resiliency and maximized the ROI on their Azure commitments.

AKS auto-upgrades

Keeping AKS clusters up to date is essential for ensuring security and performance. However, manually tracking and applying Kubernetes patch updates is tedious and error prone.

Ocean’s new auto-upgrade for AKS control plane patch versions takes the burden off your DevOps team by automatically detecting when a new patch is available. The auto-upgrade feature then applies it to your control plane and, optionally, your node infrastructure.

Ocean scans for patch versions every 24 hours and lets you decide between two methods for applying the upgrades:

• Control plane only—Update the patch version without affecting the nodes
• Control plane + node roll—Apply the patch and trigger a rolling update of virtual node groups (VNGs) using a safe blue-green deployment strategy

With support for pod disruption budgets (PDBs), customizable roll batch sizes and scheduled cluster rolls, Ocean ensures that upgrades are both safe and controlled. With the added bonuses of detailed logs and real-time visibility into progress, your team remains informed every step of the way.

Get started with smarter AKS management

With Spot, Azure users no longer need to choose between cost and performance. You can now have both while also greatly reducing operational overhead.

If you’re an existing customer and ready for your low-touch AKS future, log into your Spot console to activate these new automated features. Not a current customer? Simply schedule a demo to see how Spot can help you fully optimize your Azure environment.

Introduction

This year marks the 25th anniversary of AdminStudio, a milestone that underscores its longevity and sustained excellence in the market. Over the past quarter-century, AdminStudio has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of enterprises, solidifying its position as a trusted solution for application management.

The early days

AdminStudio, a Flexera product, is a cornerstone in application packaging and deployment for enterprises. Introduced in 2000, it initially focused on moving the large number of EXE-based installers to the Windows Installer (MSI) format. The solution quickly gained traction due to its ability to simplify the complex process of preparing applications for deployment across various environments, streamline workflows and reduce the time required for application readiness.

Key milestones

AdminStudio has undergone significant transformations over the years, including:

Why users love AdminStudio

AdminStudio’s enduring presence in the market can be attributed to several factors:

1. Comprehensive feature set—AdminStudio offers a suite of integrated tools that cover every aspect of application readiness, from importing and testing to distributing applications. This holistic approach ensures that enterprises can manage their entire application portfolio efficiently.
2. Automation and efficiency—The ability to automate repetitive tasks through PowerShell cmdlets and REST APIs significantly reduces manual effort. Enterprises can process applications in bulk, saving time and resources.
3. Integration capabilities—AdminStudio seamlessly integrates with various systems management solutions, making it easier for enterprises to deploy applications across different platforms.
4. Continuous updates—Flexera consistently updates AdminStudio to keep pace with evolving technology and enterprise needs. This commitment to innovation ensures that AdminStudio remains relevant and effective.
5. Support for modern environments—AdminStudio’s support for virtualization, Windows migrations and the latest vendor setups makes it a versatile tool for modern enterprises.
6. Largest third-party software coverage via PFM—AdminStudio has unparalleled support for thousands of vendor setups, curated for their silent switches, that are ready to be deployed.

A bright future

AdminStudio’s journey from a simple application packaging tool to a comprehensive enterprise solution is marked by continuous innovation and adaptability. Its robust feature set, automation capabilities, and integration options make it an incredible asset for enterprises looking to streamline their application management processes.

Over 66,000 companies globally have chosen AdminStudio for its reliability and efficiency in managing application portfolios. As technology continues to evolve, AdminStudio will remain a strong market contender and essential investment for companies aiming to optimize their application management.