Our Investment in Cloudability

Yes, we’ve been busy with financings lately, but we’ve been very fortunate to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs.  And today we are excited to talk about Cloudability.  Cloudability, located in Portland, OR, is creating a software platform that collects, analyzes and models cloud computing costs and usage.

We’ve long been believers in cloud computing, both as investors and users.  Forbes estimates that by 2013, 80% of companies will be using cloud-computing resources in their businesses.  Today the market spends $68 billion on cloud resources and that number is expected to triple by 2015.  These adoption numbers are being driven by the deployment of SaaS (Software as a Service) models of software deployment, but also more recently BaaS (Backend) and IaaS (Infrastructure).

While the usages and spending on the cloud increases, so does the complexity of managing a particular user’s cloud infrastructure.  First, there are many different providers of these services (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and many others) and they all offer different performance capabilities, services and pricing.  As a company deploys more of its software to the cloud, managing the optimization of costs and performance becomes a time-consuming and tedious job.

To date, there have been providers that will help manage and analyze a customer’s cloud usage, but they’ve suffered from one of two problems.  Some providers are tied to a particular cloud, for instance Amazon’s AWS.  While helpful, it is rare that one cloud provider can be all things to a company; therefore the company doesn’t have a comprehensive view of all of their cloud usage.  The second problem is usability.  To date, cloud management software has been created for IT professionals.  Unfortunately, this isn’t helpful to the business decision makers and requires translation from the technical folks and is not anywhere near real time.

The driver behind Cloudability’s adoption is the democratization of IT: anyone can buy it, and if you buy it you’ve got to keep an eye on the costs, make sure you’re getting value for money; and traditional structures the CIO & CFO use to manage costs are completely by-passed. This is a structural problem that has to be solved and requires new tools and ways of thinking.

Cloudability is creating a multi-cloud, easy-to-use platform to manage and analyze cloud resources.  Currently, they can analyze 16 different clouds to give complete visibility into the usage and spending across all of these resources.  Because of this ability and despite the early stage of the company, Cloudability currently manages over $123,000,000 of cloud spend for over 3,000 customers in 80 countries.

With Cloudability, anyone in an organization can immediately see overages, waste and sprawl of cloud resources.  This also includes predictive analytics of what future spend may look like, as well.  In the future, the data they collect across clouds will become very valuable when modeling for customers what their costs and usage could be in different scenarios designed to improve efficiency.  Furthermore, we believe that compliance issues for cloud services will only increase and Cloudability will be in the best position to analyze and report on such data.

We’ve been following the company since we met them at the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) and then through their successful experience at TechStars Cloud.  We are fortunate to get to work with Mat, J.R., Jon and rest of the Cloudability team.  Welcome to the Foundry family.