CloudHealth Bulks Up Microsoft Azure Capabilities For Growing Multi-Cloud World

CloudHealth, a vendor of software for managing cloud services that's seen rapid adoption over the last year, debuted a number of capabilities Monday that bulk up its recently introduced Microsoft Azure management product.

During Microsoft's Ignite conference in Atlanta, the Boston-based startup showcased new features that implement policy-driven management and governance controls for optimizing cost, availability and performance on Microsoft's cloud.

Much of the demand for Azure functionality came from existing CloudHealth customers that are using Amazon Web Services but expanding operations into multi-cloud environments, CloudHealth founder and CTO Joe Kinsella told CRN.

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CloudHealth originally launched its technology around Amazon's cloud. The startup later added support for Google Cloud Platform, betting that customer demand would scale around Google's services.

The company has made major strides over the last year in market recognition, growing its revenue more than 400 percent, expanding its channel with new resellers and MSPs, opening offices in San Francisco and London, and closing a Series C funding round of $20 million led by Sapphire Ventures.

In that time, CloudHealth has seen a surge in customer demand for comprehensive management capabilities around Azure, Kinsella said, often complementing infrastructure hosted by other cloud operators.

"A large percentage of enterprises and MSPs adopted Azure and Amazon and wanted that single console they could go to and manage both," Kinsella said.

CloudHealth made its Azure management product generally available only a few months ago, and almost immediately saw widespread adoption from enterprise customers and channel partners, he told CRN.

The latest release adds capabilities for granularly evaluating spending and cost allocation across business divisions, usage reporting, spending relative to enterprise agreements and burn-down reporting that shows allocation compared to spending.

It also integrates with performance metrics offered through Azure, does workload assessments, offers migration recommendations, and helps users better right-size their environments for various Azure virtual machine instances.

Jason Cutrer, founder and president of Six Nines, an IT consultancy based in Oakland, Calif., told CRN that CloudHealth's evolution to providing services around Azure workloads, in addition to AWS, sets up another profitable year for partners facilitating their customers' heterogeneous environments.

"A multi-cloud strategy is crucial to our customers, and the ability to provide visibility and governance into AWS and Azure helps us deliver on our customer service promises," Cutrer said.

Kinsella told CRN that the company has seen over the last several months many partners such as Six Nines that are helping customers implement aggressive multi-cloud adoption roadmaps.

A year and a half ago, CloudHealth only saw businesses making large cloud buys with Amazon, Kinsella said, and not with other providers.

Now Azure "seems to be rapidly gaining traction across all the different industries that we cover as well as the different profiles of customers that we have," Kinsella said. "In the last 18 months there's been a significant closing of that gap."