Flexera Software LLC says it wants to help enterprises keep a lid on their cloud spending, acquiring RightScale Inc. for an undisclosed price today to beef up its ability to do that.

Flexera is a software asset management provider that sells tools that help enterprises to automate many of the tasks required to maintain compliance with software licenses, thereby controlling their spending. Flexera’s tools help enterprises to gain visibility and control of their information technology assets, reduce ongoing software costs and maintain continuous license compliance.

As for RightScale, it bills itself as a leading cloud management and cost optimization platform provider. The company sells tools that help enterprises to manage resources and services distributed across multiple public and private clouds.

It also offers a cloud cost management service called Optima, which is sold as a standalone product. The company is known as well for its annual “State of the Cloud” report on cloud infrastructure adoption, which it will continue to publish on schedule.

Flexera said it’s acquiring RightScale so it could integrate its software asset management tools with a comprehensive cloud management platform, since its customers have been asking for these capabilities.

“We’re very excited about this acquisition – it’s transformational for Flexera and our customers,” Jim Ryan, chief executive officer of Flexera, said in a statement. “Sixty percent of IT’s budget is driven by spend in software, hardware and cloud. Public cloud spend is growing rapidly and our customers have been very clear on their desire to manage public cloud costs with Flexera.”

Flexera reckons that by combining its SAM platform with RightScale’s cloud cost optimization capabilities, it can enable “complete spend optimization” across on-premises, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. In addition, RightScale’s orchestration capabilities will allow Flexera to automate actions based on its analysis of customer’s software assets, officials said.

Although Flexera is positioning the acquisition as a big boost to its own capabilities, analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said it was a sad end for RightScale, which he said was once the most prominent tool for CIOs to determine their cloud costs. However, he said that things have changed in recent years as the number of cloud players at the top has consolidated, which makes questions around cost easier to answer.

“Rightscale becomes now part of a nonclient company, Flexera, which now gets its public cloud data,” Mueller said. “I expect Flexera to put that data to work with hybrid cloud decision tools for CIOs.”

Image: Flexera