** We are simplifying and rebranding our products to make it easier for you to understand and find our solutions! HCMX is now called OpenText Cloud Management ** |
OpenText Cloud Management (HCMX) provides seamless and consistent management of public and private clouds. It empowers organizations with capabilities for provisioning and self-service, lifecycle management, governance, and cloud financial management (FinOps). Supported by a powerful automation engine, OpenText Cloud Management helps organizations control, administer, and maintain their cloud infrastructure while taming cloud costs.
Discover OpenText Cloud Management's top new features for each quarterly release.
November 2024: What’s new in OpenText Cloud Management 24.4
Flexible Reporting Technology for FinOps: OpenText Cloud Management 24.4 elevates our FinOps functionality by empowering teams to easily create tailored, BI-style dashboards and reports using customizable queries, offering detailed insights into cost drivers and usage patterns across AWS, Azure, and OCI. Reports can be built across various dimensions to perform more granular analysis on cost and usage. Additionally, users can create meaningful visualizations without the need to export files and schedule reports for delivery to various teams, supporting cloud cost transparency and efficiency—a core element of FinOps best practices.
Integration Terraform for unified provisioning automation: Customers can now seamlessly integrate existing Terraform plans into the OpenText Cloud Management blueprint design framework, allowing them to repurpose Terraform's infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach, and achieve streamlined, centralized automation of resource delivery through OpenText Cloud Management. By centralizing deployment and management of cloud services through a unified platform, OpenText Cloud Management simplifies hybrid cloud administration, moving closer to a cohesive, all-in-one management experience.
July 2024: What’s new in HCMX 24.3
Workflow Process Automation for Rightsizing: Optimize directly from the platform. This release delivers process automation for cloud waste cleanup. It engages engineers, tracks progress and visualizes savings. Each recommendation is tracked to its completion, and approval flows ensure critical actions are approved before they are carried out.
What-if Analyses for commitment plans are now enhanced with cloud usage recommendations overlay. This allows for incorporation of integrated usage (rightsizing) insights, facilitating better decisions based on full context of both rate and usage, resulting in enhanced cost-effectiveness. Additionally, this innovation is in the process of patent approval!
Expanded cloud spend optimization support:
- Support for Oracle Cloud spend reporting (in addition to AWS, Azure, and GCP)
- Azure MCA: Reserved Instances optimization and unused disks identification (now also available for Azure MCA)
- AWS: Commitment planner (now also available for AWS)
April 2024: What’s new in HCMX 24.2
Azure recommendations for Reserved Instances (RIs). HCMX’s smart what if analyses can now be conducted for both Azure and AWS RIs and savings plans. HCMX 24.2 release enables customers to make informed tradeoffs between Reserved Instances (RIs) and savings plans, combining them more effectively, resulting in a higher cloud rate ROI.
Discovery of missing or noncompliant tags. Corrective actions are now simplified with detailed reports that pinpoint tag information requiring correction. This data can be promptly forwarded to the appropriate owners. Additionally, bulk tag population is now supported, eliminating the need for individual tag entries. Tagging requirements can be established, adjusted, and compliance with them can be monitored. Further, tags can be stored within HCMX's built-in CMDB.
Azure cloud usage recommendations for rightsizing, particularly targeting unassociated disks that often go unnoticed. This feature empowers customers to reduce cloud waste by identifying and managing underutilized resources effectively. This further expands HCMX's coverage and expertise in cloud usage optimization.
Showback coverage now include Microsoft Azure’s MPA billing accounts. While this is a “tech preview” development, we now offer spend data reporting with complete coverage for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
January 2024: What’s new in HCMX 24.1
AWS cloud usage recommendations for rightsizing allow FinOps practitioners and Engineering teams to make informed decision by identifying underutilized or idle instances and receiving actionable recommendation options.
Recommended options with utilization (%) for CPU and memory displayed.
Further, these recommendations can be evaluated in a unified module and in the context of rate optimization planning that include savings plans and reserved instances. This holistic approach that integrates and synergizes both usage (rightsizing) and rate optimization options (savings plans and reserved instances) significantly improves optimization of spending in AWS and is one of HCMX's differentiating capabilities.
Enhanced AWS cloud rate recommendations—added support for Reserved Instances (RIs): HCMX 23.4 release introduced smart what if analyses for savings plans. HCMX 24.1 takes cloud rate optimization a step further. It incorporates recommendations for Reserved Instances (RIs) within the same shared module, offering a seamless and unified user experience between the two AWS rate optimization options: RIs and savings plans.
Commitment planner portfolio for AWS savings plans gives users visibility into net savings, utilization rates, and upcoming expiration dates.
"Adopt and manage" functionality: Organizations can now seamlessly onboard their existing resources—those not deployed with HCMX—into HCMX’s governance and management framework. This pivotal feature ensures a unified approach to cloud resource control, enabling users to centralize management and optimize their diverse array of resources effortlessly, using HCMX as a single point of control.
Note: Whereas other capabilities mentioned in this blog are related directly to FinOps, "adopt and manage" is related to broader hybrid cloud management that includes other governance aspects such as configuration management, lifecycle management of provisioned resources, day-two operations, changes, access controls, etc.
October 2023: What’s new in HCMX 23.4
Smart what-if analyses for Azure and AWS Savings Plans: While AWS and Azure provide recommendations for purchasing savings plans, these recommendations do not take into account key organization-specific considerations such as:
- The maturity of your organizational FinOps practices.
- Upfront payment thresholds.
- Risks associated with underemployed resources.
- And more
HCMX’s smart what-if analyses empower teams to improve upon the savings plan recommendations from delivered from AWS or Azure—and take a more tailored, cost-effective approach to meeting organization's specific needs.
Read Azure and AWS Savings Plans: Smart What-if Analyses for Optimal Rate Discounts for more details.
FinOps automation for cloud waste cleanup: The 23.4 release empowers engineers to optimize cloud usage by routing savings recommendations directly to them for easy verification and automated execution—boosting cloud ROI.
After aggregating savings and optimization recommendations (e.g., for rightsizing) from leading cloud providers, HCMX precisely channels them to designated engineers. Subsequently, it aids engineers in evaluating these recommendations by supplying comprehensive information, facilitates the decision-making process, and offers automation-driven implementation once a recommendation is accepted or rejected.
Read FinOps Automation for Cloud Waste Cleanup for more details.
GreenOps: HCMX’s latest release allows organizations to gather in-depth insights about the carbon impact of their IT operations across clouds. New sustainability targets? No problem. With HCMX, you can identify opportunities to reduce emissions and make informed, environmentally conscious tradeoffs between cost and carbon.
You can also extend carbon tracking and analysis from the cloud to on-premises IT with Operations Bridge or OpenText Asset Management X.
Multiple root account support for AWS: HCMX now offers support for multiple cloud root accounts (also known as main accounts or master payer accounts), all within a single tenant. This support simplifies and expedites the process of gathering billing data, organizing it, and making it available in a showback format with tailored views for teams or users.