CloudBolt Software has announced an agreement to acquire Kumolus, a company that provides enterprises with cloud management, automation, governance and cost optimization solutions.  The move adds more depth to CloudBolt's product offering including cost management, security and governance capabilities, and helps it gain stronger footing in the APAC market.  This acquisition comes on the heels of CloudBolt's recent acquisition of SovLabs earlier this summer.  To find out more about this latest acquisition news, VMblog spoke with Jeff Kukowski, CEO at CloudBolt.

VMblog:  Let's kick things off by asking, who is CloudBolt?  And what pain points does it solve for enterprise customers?

Jeff Kukowski:  CloudBolt Software is the enterprise leader in cloud management and integration solutions. We provide an award-winning cloud management platform that helps enterprises manage their  hybrid, multi-cloud environments, while empowering developers with self-service IT. By turning the enterprise into the cloud provider, you unleash a responsive, agile alternative to runaway IT that gives DevOps what they want, whenever they want it. The result is greater IT efficiency, better control, and more agility. 

With CloudBolt, you can easily inventory across 20+ private cloud and public cloud environments, automate and orchestrate IT workload delivery, and manage and track cloud spend. Rich dashboards provide visibility into your multi-cloud infrastructure so you can make better decisions. Our extensible architecture lets you quickly integrate your existing tools with CloudBolt-ServiceNow, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and more-so you can advance your hybrid cloud journey, your way.

VMblog:  Who is Kumolus and how does their platform complement CloudBolt's current product?

Kukowski:  Based in Melbourne, Australia, Kumolus is a SaaS-based cloud management platform (CMP) provider that focuses on continuous cloud optimization. As one of the only worldwide CMPs to achieve AWS Cloud Management Tools Competency Status, Kumolus is recognized as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, which provides solutions to enable IT leaders with the agility, scale, resiliency and cost savings necessary for a competitive cloud strategy, as well as providing cloud operations and governance best practices to make efficient use of cloud resources across an organization. Kumolus has customers in Australia, India, and Singapore, and a rich ecosystem of technology, consulting, and MSP partners, including NEC Australia, Advent One, and many others.

The Kumolus acquisition strengthens CloudBolt's cloud management platform with a rich set of cost management, security, and governance capabilities, while positioning the company for rapid growth in Asia Pacific. The optimization capabilities Kumolus brings to CloudBolt are specifically aligned with the evolving needs of enterprise cloud management today. The acquisition comes on the heels of CloudBolt's recent SovLabs acquisition and is subject to customary closing and regulatory approvals.

VMblog:  From a technology perspective, what does Kumolus currently offer their customers that is unique in the market?

Kukowski:  Kumolus delivers on the promise of full-stack cloud visualization, cost management, cloud security, and governance, with a focus on automated outcomes. It helps enterprises manage cloud deployments intuitively and with the confidence that any misconfiguration will be automatically remediated. When you scale beyond human control, Kumolus enhances service efficiency, secures services, drives policy automation and reduces costs.

Cloud Visualization

Kumolus offers cloud visualization and provisioning in real time without the need for code. With just one click, you have end-to-end visibility of your existing cloud infrastructure and network topology. Dynamic visualization of all of your cloud resources and configurations is a key, differentiated way to show service hierarchies with cost and security overlays. As you deploy and configure a service, that service cost is added to intuitive visualization diagrams in real time. This type of visualization also reduces security risks, as multiple teams can clearly see what is happening in their application stacks.

Cost Management and Optimization

Cost optimization and spend overrun is a big problem for most organizations. Kumolus' cloud cost management and optimization capabilities control cloud services-related spending by monitoring, reporting and automatically optimizing cloud resources. It monitors cloud infrastructure usage, tracks spending as it relates to resource usage and uses policy-driven workflows to reduce cost without manual intervention. Specific cloud costs can be allocated to the appropriate business units for  showbacks/chargebacks, idling and rightsizing recommendations, and notifications on public cloud discounts.

Compliance and Security

Kumolus integrates cloud management tightly with governance, compliance and security by helping enterprises define, continuously monitor and audit policies. Kumolus automates and controls the processes that allocate your cloud resource deployment and configuration, and allows you to dynamically visualize cloud services for compliance against standards including CIS, PCI-DSS, and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Event Scheduling and Workflow Automation

Cloud workflow automation drives continual service optimization. Rightsizing, instance class remediation, automated start / stop / terminate, scaling services, backup compliance, etc. should be policy-driven wherever possible. With Kumolus, enterprises have a robust workflow automation that can deliver fast, actionable insights to the people who need them, such as IT, security, finance teams, and more.

VMblog:  How will your current customers benefit from the addition of Kumolus, and does this acquisition point to greater trends in the market overall?

Kukowski:  This is a big step towards making CloudBolt a true game changer in the cloud management platform space. Our customers now enjoy more capabilities to reduce costs, improve governance and ensure compliance in the public cloud space.

We see that enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy more rapidly to empower their developers and maintain control. According to Flexera's 2020 State of the Cloud report, the top three cloud challenges for enterprises are security (83% of enterprises), managing cloud spend (82%), and governance (79%). In addition, Gartner states that by 2023, 90% of enterprises will make governance their primary requirement when selecting cloud management tooling, up from less than 30% in 2020.

Thus, with our SovLabs and Kumolus acquisitions, CloudBolt will help enterprises transform how IT is built, consumed, and governed. CloudBolt is breaking the mould of legacy CMPs and empowering enterprises to leverage a single partner for codeless integrations, hybrid cloud management and governance.

VMblog:  What is going to happen to your flagship cloud management platform?  Will Kumolus solutions live on their own or will they be integrated into the CloudBolt platform?

Kukowski:  We'll continue to offer CloudBolt to customers especially for those in hybrid environments, and as those companies have specific public cloud needs around cost, security, or governance, they'll have the option of going deep with Kumolus. Over time, we'll look for key integration points to bring the two platforms together.

VMblog:  How does the acquisition of Kumolus align with your vision of the cloud management landscape for the new decade?

Kukowski:  As IT, security, and development organizations aggressively invest in hybrid cloud, the need for improved visibility, cost control, and security is paramount. As a SaaS-based solution, Kumolus strengthens CloudBolt's long-standing mission of delivering rapid time-to-value to customers, and we'll be in an even stronger place with Kumolus' visualization, cost optimization, and governance capabilities. Moreover, as we grow our customer base beyond North America and Europe, we look forward to the momentum and partner network that Kumolus has built to accelerate our growth worldwide.

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