Just a week after announcing its $US650 million acquisition of SimpliVity, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has revealed plans to bolster its hybrid cloud pay-as-you-go pricing capabilities with the acquisition of Californian cloud consumption analytics software provider, Cloud Cruiser.
The company revealed on January 23 that it had inked a definitive agreement to acquire Cloud Cruiser, founded in 2010, for an undisclosed sum.
Cloud Cruiser has made a name for itself thanks to its IT infrastructure consumption analytics application, which enables businesses manage and optimise public, private, and hybrid cloud usage and spend.
“Cloud Cruiser is already a key component of HPE’s Flexible Capacity business; we currently license Cloud Cruiser’s solutions in our Flexible Capacity offering and, in fact, we are their largest customer,” HPE technology services support senior vice-president, Scott Weller, said in a statement.
“This acquisition marks additional investment in HPE Flexible Capacity, to further differentiate and strengthen this high growth service,” he said.
Flexible Capacity is part of HPE’s technology services portfolio, offering on-premise IT infrastructure with cloud economics. According to Weller, it enables customers to manage IT infrastructure in their own datacentre, while paying for it as-a-service.
It is expected that the new acquisition will help to facilitate the Flexible Capacity offering’s ability to accurately measure hybrid cloud usage.
When the transaction closes, Cloud Cruiser will become a “key part” of the datacentre care portfolio within HPE’s technology services support business.
Cloud Cruiser co-founder and CEO, David Zabrowski – who served as vice-president and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Computer Organisation from 1997 to 2002 – will report to Weller in his new role, following the closure of the deal.
“It is with great anticipation that we embark on this next phase of our Cloud Cruiser journey with HPE,” Zabrowski said in a statement.
“Our relationship with HP started in 2010 as they became our first partner, first product integration, and our first joint customer win. Fast forward a few years, and HPE is now one of Cloud Cruiser’s largest customers.
“Looking forward, we are excited to bring our domain expertise to enhance HPE’s Flexible Capacity offering with support for Windows Azure Stack and other services, as well as continue our rapid pace of innovation in our SaaS app, Cloud Cruiser 16,” he said.
Zabrowski stressed that Cloud Cruiser’s existing customers would remain the company’s “utmost focus,” regardless of the acquisition, and that it would continue to provide support and product enhancements post-acquisition.
The acquisition follows hot on the heels of HPE’s announcement on January 17 that it had struck a deal to acquire privately held hyper-converged infrastructure provider, SimpliVity, for $US650 million.
The final purchase price of the US-based hyper-convergence company came well under earlier, unconfirmed estimates, with industry rumours putting the potential sale price into the territory of billions, rather than millions, of dollars.
HPE hopes that, by pulling together its own infrastructure, automation, and cloud management software with SimpliVity’s software-defined data management platform, the company and its partners will be able to deliver the industry’s only “built-for-enterprise” hyper-converged offering.
“This transaction expands HPE’s software-defined capability and fits squarely within our strategy to make Hybrid IT simple for customers,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise president and CEO, Meg Whitman, said at the time.
“More and more customers are looking for solutions that bring them secure, highly resilient, on-premises infrastructure at cloud economics. That’s exactly where we’re focused,” she said.
