NetApp sells Spot business to Flexera for $100M

No longer marks the Spot

Flexera is a cloud management vendor specializing in service orchestration, policy management and cost optimization with its flagship platform, Flexera One.

Spot by NetApp is a portfolio of offerings for cloud cost control and service automation that grew out of the acquisition of Spot in 2020. Specific management products within Spot by NetApp include Elastigroup for virtual machine management, Spot Ocean for Kubernetes infrastructure and CloudCheckr for FinOps.

Flexera will specifically benefit from Spot's hybrid cloud, SaaS application and container management experience and technology, according to Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Flexera, in a joint press release from the two companies. Flexera expects to gain Kubernetes cost management and commitment management capabilities, according to the release.

NetApp's Haiyan Song, executive vice president of intelligent operations services at NetApp, cited a changing strategy for the storage vendor's business as a reason for the sale, saying in the release that it "reinforces our dedication to driving value creation and achieving our ambitious growth objectives."

NetApp did not respond to an Informa TechTarget's request for comment by press time regarding employee layoffs or how services will change for existing Spot customers.

NetApp has positioned itself recently as a vendor of "intelligent data infrastructure" focused on storage hardware and software optimized for hybrid cloud deployments and AI projects, according to Simon Robinson, an analyst at Informa TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.

Spot's cloud-centric business and products were a vestigial to the company's current ambitions after almost five years in the NetApp catalog, he said.

"This is a good move by NetApp," Robinson said. "Given where they were in 2020 and how they thought the cloud opportunity would evolve, it made sense at the time. But as they've doubled down on this [infrastructure] strategy, this sort of capability is tangential rather than being a core part of their story."

Spot complicated NetApp's sales team strategy for potential customers within enterprise IT, Robinson said. FinOps teams likely had their own tools and services, making a pitch from a storage specialist unnecessary, he said.

"For a company like NetApp, how many personas do they want to go after?" he said. "Did they really want to be going after the FinOps persona as well?"  

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.