PaaS and SaaS, workloads AI, on-premise environments… When it comes to FinOps, requirements are advancing faster than many providers can keep up.
Gartner states this in the Magic Quadrant dedicated to this market. It also notes, among other things, that pressure from the hyperscalers on pure players will increase all the more as the FOCUS specification becomes more widely adopted. This specification will indeed promote the integration of data from other clouds.
The American firm limited its analysis to IaaS and PaaS. It defined a list of criteria that FinOps tooling providers must meet on at least two platforms among AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI. In broad terms:
- Reporting and configurable analytics with the possibility of daily updates
- Detection of variances from expectations
- Identification of optimization opportunities and suggested actions
- Automated management of commitments and the chargeback
- Monitoring of VMs, storage, databases “and/or” containers
- Support for multiple user profiles
- Modeling of workloads
13 providers, 3 “Leaders”
Designated “Leaders” last year, Broadcom, Flexera and IBM remain so.
On the execution axis of the Magic Quadrant, intended to translate the ability to actually meet market demand, the situation is as follows:
| Rank | Vendor | Annual Change |
| 1 | IBM | = |
| 2 | Datadog | +2 |
| 3 | Flexera | -1 |
| 4 | Broadcom (CloudHealth) | -1 |
| 5 | Harness | = |
| 6 | ServiceNow | = |
| 7 | DoIt International | new entrant |
| 8 | Anodot (Umbrella) | +1 |
| 9 | CloudZero | +1 |
| 10 | CoreStack | -2 |
| 11 | CloudBolt | = |
| 12 | Finout | new entrant |
| 13 | Zesty | new entrant |
On the “Vision” axis, reflecting the strategies (sector, geography, go-to-market, product…) :
| Rank | Vendor | Annual Change |
| 1 | IBM | = |
| 2 | Flexera | = |
| 3 | CloudZero | +2 |
| 4 | Broadcom | -1 |
| 5 | Anodot | -1 |
| 6 | DoIt International | new entrant |
| 7 | CloudBolt | -1 |
| 8 | Finout | new entrant |
| 9 | Datadog | -2 |
| 10 | Harness | -1 |
| 11 | CoreStack | -1 |
| 12 | ServiceNow | -1 |
| 13 | Zesty | new entrant |
At Broadcom, an automation framework poorly integrated
Gartner notes that Broadcom is one of the few vendors that enables cost management for both VMware on-prem deployments and cloud migrations. It also praises the level of detail in cost allocation and the availability of a large set of out-of-the-box reports.
Depending on the maturity level of users, onboarding may require a learning curve. Moreover, Broadcom does not offer a native workflow for optimization or for managing budget overruns. And its automation framework is, overall, not well integrated with the CloudHealth platform.
Flexera still has work to do on Spot integration
Flexera stands out for its exhaustive coverage of cloud environments. It is also strong on cloud-to-cloud migrations and on integration with its ITAM offering.
To fully unlock the platform’s potential, some coding is required. Another area of caution: the minimal support for KPI tracking (savings achieved, in particular). Gartner also regrets that per-account leaderboards exist only in Spot, still largely separated from Flexera One (integration work between the two solutions is in progress, as Flexera completed the Spot acquisition in March).
IBM, still not praised on pricing
Like Flexera, IBM earns a credit for strong support of cloud environments, with, moreover, a relative level of functional parity. It also stands out in planning and in cost allocation (chargeback/showback).
Given the breadth of its portfolio, the interactions and dependencies within can be confusing—and raise long-term uncertainties about evolution. Costs are another concern, being less flexible and higher than those of the competition. Gartner also notes that most remediation capabilities reside in Turbonomic, integrated only minimally with Cloudability.
