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Cloudy upstart touts lasso for rustling up Big Tech office spending

CloudHealth punts metadata sniffing stuff

Analysis There are two kinds of technology: the sexy new stuff that creates a new product category and the ho-hum kind for beancounters to help manage things better.

VC-cash-chugger CloudHealth has the boring one, but nonetheless claims it has bagged some 3,000 customers over four years of selling.

Its software sucks up multifarious metadata from Amazon and Azure, at granular compute and storage levels over time, and aggregates, analyses and reports on it, relating it to on-premises spend. It also makes recommendations about optimising cloud usage in terms of capacity planning governance and cost.

The tech runs relatively invisibly in a back-office scenario – out of sight but connected to million-dollar-plus public cloud resource purchases.

Once a firm that does this type of thing is in place and in use in an enterprise, it is likely to stick there. It might be dull and boring and back office-y, but it could generate rivers of cash from the enterprise base.

CloudHealth, founded by CTO Joe Kinsella, board chairman Dan Phillips and EVP for Customer Support Dave Eicher in 2013, has total funding of $85.7m, although it is not yet profitable.

  • 2013 – $4.5m A1 round
  • 2014 – $3.2m A2 round
  • 2015 – $12m B-round
  • 2016 – $20m C-round
  • 2017 – $46m D-round

CEO Tom Axbey, who was hired last year, said it is in investment mode. His firm has claimed it has $5.5bn of cloud spend under its management after 48 months of operation. It said 2,150 of its 3,000 customers come in through MSPs – for which CloudHealth developed a specific version of its product platform with multi-tenancy features.

The product supports AWS and Azure. Google Cloud Platform support is in beta and possibly available by the end of June. It also supports both virtualized and containerized servers.

Axbey says CloudHealth provides "detailed analytic reporting way deeper than any public cloud platform".

We're told the AWS cost savings it can initiate include terminating zombie assets (paid for but unused resources), right-sizing EC2 instances and EBS volumes, upgrading instances to the latest generation, and deleting disassociated IP addresses. One obvious piece of functionality is chargeback, which is able to identify and size department and line-of-business use of cloud resources and charge these users.

Another is simple governance with the ability to identify, control and mange who in a business is using what cloud resources, when and where.

Axbey said he is focused on "building value", and said that while an IPO might arrive at a future date, the business infrastructure still being built out. There will be 25 people in the London office by the end of the year and recruitment is ongoing in mainland Europe. ®

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