HPE to Acquire Cloud Cruiser to Measure Cloud Consumption

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Cloud Cruiser, the San Jose, Calif.-based cloud software provider that helps businesses control cloud spend, has been acquired by HPE in a deal announced on Monday.

According to a blog post by HPE’s Scott Weller, SVP of Technology Services Support, the addition of Cloud Cruiser will help its customers manage cloud spend, a task that becomes more difficult as workloads are spread across on-premises infrastructure and public cloud.

HPE plans to use Cloud Cruiser’s technology to accurately meter and bill for customers’ consumption of IT, as part of HPE Flexible Capacity, a consumption model which allows customers to manage infrastructure in their own data center but pay for it as-a-service.

“A critical piece of HPE Flexible Capacity is measurement – the ability to accurately meter and bill for customers’ consumption of IT– that differentiates Flexible Capacity from other offers,” Weller said.

“As a Cloud Cruiser customer, we have seen first-hand the value that Cloud Cruiser’s technology creates by enabling HPE Flexible Capacity to meter and bill for usage of on-premise IT infrastructure in a pay-as-you-go model. By continuing to enhance the Cloud Cruiser platform and SaaS app Cloud Cruiser 16, more tightly integrating it into HPE Flexible Capacity and leveraging the deep domain expertise of the Cloud Cruiser team, we are excited about the opportunity to accelerate the adoption of innovative consumption-based IT offerings and simplify hybrid IT for our customers.”

Cloud Cruiser works with a variety of cloud providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, so customers can measure the cost and usage information of workloads regardless of where they sit. In a recent interview with Talkin’ Cloud, HPE’s Eugene O’Callaghan, vice president of workload and cloud, said that though some of its clients are completely in the public cloud, the majority have a mix of on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud.

With this strategy shift, a tool to measure usage and control costs across a customer's infrastructure in an automated way is a welcome addition to HPE’s portfolio, which also recently added managed services for Microsoft Azure.

Cloud Cruiser will be under the Data Center Care portfolio within HPE’s Technology Services Support organization. The company’s co-founder and CEO David Zabrowski (an HP alum), will report to Weller.

“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, utilizing Cloud Cruiser to power Flexible Capacity, a consumption based, pay-as-you-go service. Over this time, our teams worked together collaboratively, which I only expect to deepen as we become one,” Zabrowski said in a blog post on the Cloud Cruiser website.

HPE has started 2017 off strong with its $650 million acquisition last week of SimpliVity, a provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure.

As a report by The VAR Guy notes, the acquisition of SimpliVity will help HPE gain traction in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, which is expected to reach $5 billion by the end of 2019.

This article originally appeared here, on Talkin' Cloud.