Flexera's India Strategy: A CTO's Perspective

As the pace of digital transformation speeds up, Flexera is investing even more into India, in particular as a strategic hub for innovation, product development, and customer success. Flexera's Chief Technology Officer, Brian Shannon, shares reflections on how we have redefined and rethought our view of India, what makes India a good opportunity for Flexera, and the way the India GCC is contributing to Flexera’s global FinOps and cloud cost optimization strategy.

How has Flexera's perception of India's strategic importance evolved in recent years? What specific factors are driving this increased focus?

Flexera's perception has changed greatly in recent years regarding India's strategic importance to the business.  Not only is the talent level where it needs to be to help drive strategic initiatives important to the business, but the full complement of roles exist to make it all happen - from support to quality to engineering to product management to UX.  Full stack teams that own business-critical outcomes can now fully take ownership and drive their own success.

In your view, what unique advantages does India offer to Flexera's global operations and innovation strategy?

One unique advantage is around the support of customers in multiple time zones around the world.  We have large cohorts of customers in North America and Europe while our presence in Asia is growing.  The team in India can support all of these regions.

Beyond engineering, in what other areas is Flexera leveraging the talent and expertise available in India? Are we seeing growth in areas like research, product management, or customer success?

We are leveraging the talent and expertise in all functions at Flexera including running multiple company division.  We have Finance, HR, Support, Customer Success, Product Management, Quality, and Architecture and more all represented.

Are there specific examples of how the Indian team has influenced Flexera's global product strategy or market approach?

In 2024, we held a session with a major global SI in which we jointly designed the next iteration of our FinOps offerings in order to support the growth and strategies of that global SI.  These solutions will, of course, be leveraged by not only this customer, but also drive best practices within the FinOps space.

As Global CTO, how are you seeing the FinOps landscape evolving, and what role is Flexera playing in driving innovation in this space?

We are seeing the FinOps space starting to pull in other adjacent disciplines.  In my world, I am seeing DevOps 'shift left' in the FinOps world.  In other words, how do I design architectures and systems that take into account the eventual cloud, SaaS, AI, and data spend as early as possible in the design process so that we can ensure we are creating profitable solutions for customers? 

There's nothing worse than creating a great piece of technology only to find out you can't run it for anyone at an acceptable margin.

How is Flexera leveraging emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to enhance its FinOps and cloud cost optimization solutions?

We are working with customers to ensure we are building value add feature sets and not just using AI to use AI. 

Two things have emerged: 1) help customers with all the manual work involved in loading data from POs and invoices into their systems utilizing document-related AI.  And 2) help customers to detect anomalies and / or predict future trends in spend in the cloud.  Both of these features sets are in Beta and/or will be generally available soon.

What are the biggest challenges organizations face in managing cloud costs, and how is Flexera helping them overcome these challenges?

The biggest challenges that I see is that it is very hard to predict and have visibility into what's actually out there in their estate - even when you do your due diligence in estimating costs necessary for deploying a service or a product, there are always surprises. 

And they are typically to the tune of millions of dollars.  And organizations need clean, curated data in order to effectively manage operations, feed AI models, and meet compliance and regulatory requirements. 

So we help find areas in your estate where you can fully optimize, save real dollars, and get those most of the software and services you have whether it is in the cloud or via a SaaS service.  And because it's all clean and curated, it is ideal for AI models and gives assurance we can provide the data necessary for audits or GRC related requirements.

How will the India GCC contribute to Flexera's overall innovation and product development efforts in the long term?

The India GCC is already a key part in building out our Technology Intelligence Platform, AI services, FinOps, ITAM, SaaS Management, and Flexera One Platform.  The team will continue to own these critical pieces of the Flexera business as well as new products and services that emerge.

What new areas of focus or investment can we expect to see from Flexera in India in the near future?

As with most organizations, our primary investments are going into our Data, Platform, and AI.  I see the organization continuing to grow as it has in the past few years.  We will continue to see our customers in need of clean, curated data increase and we want to be able to enable our customers to pull more of this data into Flexera systems where we can help to clean and enrich it for a myriad of use cases.