Click to learn more about author Jay Chapel.
There has been a rush of cloud management acquisitions lately, with VMware, Apptio, and Flexera making major acquisitions oer the past year alone (with more to follow). I thought it would be useful to compile a centralized list, so we can take a look at the trends in this market and why these acquisitions are accelerating.
The Multi-Faceted Cloud Management Industry
First, let’s be clear: The cloud management industry is broad and a bit ambiguous, but as it matures, industry analysts have begun to define specific categories. We found the information below compiled in a recent Gartner blog:
We fit into the “Cost Management and Resource Optimization” category, which in and of itself is broad, but in a nutshell, these vendors help enterprises monitor, manage, govern, and control cloud spend in a variety of ways. The other category we find intriguing is “Provisioning and Orchestration.” That’s where we feel a lot of the DevOps tools fit, and that is the go-to-market model we like to fashion ourselves after — technical user/buyer, self-service trials, SaaS, and freemium model.
Cloud Management Acquisitions, 2013-2020
So, it should come as no surprise that we have collected the following data points listed below — we would welcome your feedback on others we should add to this list.
In the last six months or so, the cloud management platform (CMP) space has been hyperactive as VMware acquired CloudHealth, Apptio acquired FittedCloud, and Flexera acquired RightScale. This is good news for all, especially about CloudHealth.
What These Cloud Management Acquisitions Tell Us About the State of Public Cloud
So, what does this tell us about the cloud management space, and in particular, the cost management and optimization space? We have some opinions:
1. Multi-cloud is truly here. The benefit of these cloud management tools is that they are agnostic and can help enterprises manage and optimize AWS, Azure, and Google services alike.
2. Companies like Cisco, HPE, and VMware understand the importance of being in the public cloud game; each basically failed at competing against AWS, et al. head-on, so they are now ensuring they have tools that help enterprises manage public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud services.
3. The cost management portion of cloud management is always a “top 3” concern of CIOs and CTOs according to any cloud survey published, so cloud cost optimization is front and center in enterprise IT, and ISVs must be able to address this concern.
Clearly, cloud management acquisitions will continue, and new solutions and companies will evolve as this market grows and matures. The cloud providers are launching new services at a rapid pace, and, like any large-scale utility, there need to be tools to help manage, govern, secure, and optimize these existing and new services.