The CEO of Flexera has branded its acquisition of peer Snow Software a “big win” for customers and partners as he stressed that the vendor will continue to support both sets of solutions.
US-based IT asset management specialist Flexera today announced it has agreed to snap up Sweden-headquartered technology intelligence outfit Snow.
Employing 1,300 and 700 staff, respectively, they were both among the 18 vendors assessed in Gartner’s recent Market Guide for Software Asset Management tools. The SAM managed services space that is dominated by resellers including Crayon, Bytes, SoftwareOne and Trustmarque, as IT Channel Oxygen covered here.
Despite some questions about product overlap (see below), Flexera CEO Jim Ryan claimed the duo have “different centres of gravity in different subsegments in a broad and dynamic space”.
“This acquisition is a big win for the customers and partners of both companies,” Ryan (pictured) said.
“Through this acquisition, our people, portfolios and our combined strengths give customers even more choices and an expanded foundation for ITAM and FinOps.”
Flexera will “innovate, enhance, maintain and support” both Flexera and Snow solutions, it emphasised. It claimed it will also continue to work with partners of Snow, including those which offer hosted options.
Flexera claims that up to 32% of global IT spending is wasted. Both firms offer solutions designed to help organisations asses and cut this wasted spend.
“The combined strengths of Flexera and Snow will help our customers realise the ongoing value of their technology investments,” said Vishal Rao, President and CEO of Snow.
“With this step, we see an incredible opportunity to accelerate technology intelligence while complementing Flexera’s mission to help customers derive more value from their technology.”
Industry reaction
Rich Gibbons, Managing Director of ITAM Review – an online community for worldwide ITAM professionals – gave a cautious greeting to the news.
“Both organisations have made a lot of progress in marrying ITAM and FinOps over the last few years, as well as embracing new areas of focus for ITAM professionals such as sustainability and AI,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“Both Flexera and Snow have some fantastic people and great roadmaps. Hopefully, together they will continue to innovate and bring new features for customers.
“As with any market disruption, it will bring potential issues for customers and partners, but also plenty of opportunities.”
Steven Davison, CEO of asset management service specialist Appstrato, dubbed it a “bold move”, meanwhile.
“This gets Flexera into the SMB sector and increases their customer base by some pretty large percentages. There are some question marks on what the integration would like, if at all? There is so much cross over in the technologies,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
