Broadcom Inc.’s Tanzu division today unveiled a sweeping redesign of CloudHealth, its longstanding cloud financial management platform, aimed at democratizing FinOps across technical and nontechnical teams.

The semiconductor and infrastructure software giant said it’s the most significant overhaul of CloudHealth since the product’s launch in 2012.

The new release introduces artificial intelligence-powered features called Intelligent Assist and Smart Summary that allow users to interact with data using natural language and get more granular insight into cloud spending shifts. Broadcom said the goal is to reduce the time it takes users to understand, report on and act upon cloud costs in multicloud environments.

Broadcom’s announcement arrives as FinOps practices are becoming mainstream. The FinOps Foundation’s 2025 State of FinOps report found that 44% of FinOps teams were created within the past year. The scope of the practice is also expanding, as teams are now expected to go beyond cloud billing to handle usage forecasting, architectural decisions and departmental accountability.

Expanding the FinOps audience

CloudHealth’s new design seeks to lower the barrier to entry for nonspecialists by shifting from raw data and custom SQL to a more accessible interface. “We’ve completely revamped the user experience to be easy for a modern FinOps practice and end consumers to use,” said Cathal Cleary, CloudHealth product leader. “[Teams] can very quickly see if it’s where they expect to be, and if not, dive deeper.”

This focus on broader usability reflects a core challenge in FinOps: Cost optimization recommendations have historically been created by centralized teams, often separate from engineering. App teams may have already made critical infrastructure decisions by the time a report is issued. The redesigned CloudHealth aims to improve visibility earlier in the application lifecycle and extend access to more people involved in cloud decisions.

AI leads new features

Intelligent Assist is a generative AI chatbot integrated into the user interface that allows users to type natural language queries such as “show me all idle instances” or “build a report for monthly Azure cost by service type.” They get both answers and autogenerated SQL queries that can be refined. Broadcom said that is a significant timesaver for those unfamiliar with SQL.

“The complaint in the past was that CloudHealth is rich in the amount of data, inferences and recommendations, but how do people quickly get to it?” said Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured), general manager of Broadcom’s Tanzu division.

Smart Summary addresses the perennial question of why cloud bills change. The tool scans customer billing data and explains in plain English what changed, why it changed and how to fix overages down to the unit price. “We’re the only tool that can give you a simple English explanation of what caused a change and a unit price analysis,” Cleary said.

“We’re taking billions of lines of cost data and boiling it down to a couple of hundred lines,” Padmanabhan added.

Getting gen AI right

CloudHealth is a relative latecomer to generative AI, but executives said building in the features wasn’t trivial. The platform ingests roughly 10 petabytes of cost and usage data daily across 22,000 customers. Understanding which data sets to query and how to join them was a major technical hurdle, Padmanabhan said.

“This was not just throwing a random SQL format at them,” she said. “You want the right summarizations, descriptions, inferences and recommendations.”

The company tested AI models for more than six months to ensure accurate recommendations, she said. Users who manage millions of dollars in cloud spending demand absolute confidence in the numbers. “With CloudHealth, we cannot budge an inch on the accuracy of data and recommendations,” she said.

That philosophy also helped shape a partnership last year with Arrow Electronics Inc. that makes it the exclusive global provider of CloudHealth. “CloudHealth is the sole FinOps solution they carry, and they are driving it,” Padmanabhan said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE