Snow Software helps ITAM teams get control of costs in the cloud

Snow Software has introduced new and enhanced capabilities to support IT leaders seeking to negotiate better contract terms, lower operating expenses and boost organisational-wide efficiencies during this period of macroeconomic uncertainty. The latest features offer a richer view of an organisation’s IT investments and the impact to the business, providing new ways to optimise costs and ensure value of complex technologies like containers and cloud services. Container visibility, one of the newest innovations on the Snow Atlas platform, provides details on applications running in Kubernetes containers to identify cost savings.

“The macroeconomic environment is forcing organisations to seek a deeper understanding of how all areas of their business are performing,” said Sanjay Castelino, Chief Product and Customer Officer at Snow. “With large annual budgets devoted to IT spend, demonstrating return on investment for every technology purchase is vital for CIOs and IT teams. The latest release from Snow not only identifies how technology is used but also offers use cases to support more sustainable IT practices such as understanding the carbon footprint of devices. With IT environments more complex than ever, the intelligence Snow provides serves as the backbone for organisations seeking to get more control over IT spending and risk.”

Gaining Visibility of Container Environments

More than 70% of global organisations will use containerised applications by 2023, according to industry analysts. Widespread use of containers creates new barriers for organisations seeking to understand what is running in a container – let alone control costs.

The new container visibility feature available on Snow Atlas is designed to provide IT teams and IT asset managers (ITAM) details on what applications are running, how many containers are used in their environment, and how long containers have been running. In this release, the capability provides insights into Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat standard containerised applications running in Kubernetes environments. Container visibility is available for Kubernetes environments running on major cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure environments. This insight enables IT and ITAM teams to manage cost more efficiently.

Snow is inviting organisations with Kubernetes environments to use the functionality, with general availability of the capability aimed at early 2023.

Empowering ITAM to Partner with FinOps to Manage Rising Cloud Costs

To give a more complete picture of the end-to-end organisational tech stack, the latest release from Snow gives ITAM teams a spend snapshot across AWS and Azure in the terminology and views used by ITAM. With this new service – available to all Snow Atlas customers – ITAM teams have improved views of their organisation’s spend profile in public cloud natively within their SAM tool. By building this feature natively within the existing SAM product, Snow makes it easier for ITAM to drive conversations about spend optimisation with cloud stakeholders and FinOps teams.

For organisations with more mature cloud practices, FinOps or cloud operations practitioners, Snow Cloud Cost powered by Anodot provides greater depth of visibility, insights and analysis on public cloud spend, controls for budget management and spend allocation, detection of anomalies and recommendations for optimising spend.

Enabling IT to Build a Sustainable Enterprise

Developing a more sustainable enterprise is a top priority for most CIOs. Snow makes it easier for IT teams to deliver on their sustainability goals. Organisations can leverage existing ITAM data, such as the laptop and desktop details, to assess their sustainability baseline. This sustainability intelligence report from Snow also includes curated information on how many certified sustainable devices exist, the spectrum of energy efficient devices and an evaluation of carbon emission reduction with on-premises to cloud shifts. The data provided by Snow enables CIOs and IT leaders to take proactive measures to actively manage and advance their sustainability initiatives.

Expanded Support to Reduce S/4 HANA Migration Risks

With the end of maintenance for Business Suite 7 approaching, the migration to S/4HANA is a strategic imperative for many organisations. Snow is releasing new license intelligence, contract management and management dashboards for Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software to help offer further support with S/4HANA migrations. The new license intelligence capabilities allow organisations to easily simulate alternative license scenarios for both usage and authorisation-based licensing, helping them decide on the most efficient and cost-effective migration strategy. In addition, new functionality allows for more transparent and secure management of an organisation’s SAP environment by providing insight into license metrics and enhanced controls over contract management.