by Jay Chapel | Oct 18, 2018 | Cloud Services | 2 comments

There has been a rush of cloud management acquisitions lately, with VMware, Apptio, and Flexera making major acquisitions in the last three months alone (and 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 below put together by Gartner in a recent blog:

ParkMyCloud fits 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, 2013-2018

So it should be 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 45 days or so the cloud management platform (CMP) space has been hyperactive as VMware acquired CloudHealth, Apptio acquired FittedCloud, and Flexera acquired Rightscale. Good news for all but we are most excited for CloudHealth given we are a commercial and technology partner with them.

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 in 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 needs to be tools to help manage, govern, secure, and optimize these existing and new services.