Tracking technology spend has always been a complicated task. Now add the increased complexity of the information technology environment, the imperative to digitally transform, and the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s easy to see how many companies are letting cloud spend get out of control.

“Just when we thought we’d figured out what assets were running in virtual machines, you got containers going up and down,” said Jim Ryan (pictured, left), president and chief executive officer of Flexera Software LLC. “And trying to find out what assets are in containers across a hybrid, multicloud environment is the latest substantiation of chasing your tail around in circles.”

Ryan and Marie Godfrey (pictured, right), senior vice president of product at Flexera, spoke with Keith Townsend, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed practical ways companies can optimize their technology spend by eliminating waste from legacy costs to increase budget for cloud innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Value optimization takes from legacy to give to cloud

Flexera is known for its “State of the Cloud” and other industry reports, but the company also has a long legacy of software asset management. This puts it in a great position to advise customers on optimizing technology spend, according to Godfrey. By creating a new IT management category around technology value optimization, known as TVO, Flexera has set out to bridge the strategic gap between IT service management and financial management.

“[TVO] is the critical factor around how to understand that return on investments and how to better understand and monetize the value for our customers in terms of what they have today and where they need to go,” Godfrey said.

The “elephant in the room” is that even though the focus is on cloud, the vast majority of an organization’s budget is still spent on legacy applications and hardware, according to Ryan.

“If you’re a CIO or someone working in the CIO’s organization what you’ve got to realize and focus on is that 70 percent of your applications and your spend and your tech stack are still on-premise and VM’s and other things that simply can’t be ignored,” he said.

There’s a simple way to solve this. But it requires communication across the cloud divide.

“Lean in and listen,” Ryan stated. “The biggest problem we have when we’re talking with our customers is that the cloud people aren’t talking to the on-prem legacy asset management people.”

Flexera One brings all the company’s TVO solutions together to provide a single pane of glass that gives visibility into a company’s entire IT asset estate across on-premises data centers, virtual machines and physical devices, as well as the cloud environment, according to Ryan.

“We focus on giving CIOs and IT teams the insight into what’s going on in your on-premise estate,” he said. “You can take money from your legacy stack and throw it over to invest in more innovative things that are going to move the needle for your business.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Flexera Software LLC. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Flexera nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE