CloudBolt Software recently announced their "Winter" release, featuring significant enhancements to help enterprises accelerate their hybrid cloud and IT automation journeys.  This new release features powerful capabilities across the company's cloud management (CloudBolt, Kumolus) and codeless integration (OneFuse) solutions.  To learn more, VMblog reached out to Grant Ho, the Chief Marketing Officer at CloudBolt. 

VMblog:  In a nutshell, what is CloudBolt, and what differentiates it from its competitors?

Grant Ho:  CloudBolt is a software company that is passionately committed to meeting customers wherever they are on their hybrid cloud journey and helping them to accelerate their digital transformation. While our portfolio of products and services offers management, integration, and security and compliance solutions for hybrid cloud management, it's really about helping customers reduce time to value for their cloud and infrastructure investments. We believe this is what makes us different: the ability to provide flexible technology and deep expertise to help organizations fulfill their unique objectives.

VMblog:  What new capabilities are included in your latest release?

Ho:  The CloudBolt Winter release provides additional value to customers using products across our comprehensive portfolio. We strengthened our integration and management capabilities for IaC and DevOps tooling. We released additional integration capabilities for vRealize Automation users, including extensibility features for Ansible Tower. We also provided a way for our users to intelligently package scripts as reusable, governed services; this feature has been particularly well received by VMware customers since it allows us to package PowerCLI as a consumable service.

In addition to this, we also released additional cost management options for vCenter environments to help CloudBolt customers better manage cost allocations on-premises. Moreover, with more customization of reports and Slack integration, we made it easier to identify idle resources and eliminate wasteful cloud spend. Also, we simplified how Terraform plans can be consumed using CloudBolt blueprints, empowering non-Terraform experts to perform these tasks and driving a higher return on investment.

VMblog:  Last time we spoke, we talked about your acquisition of Kumolus.  How do these new capabilities enhance the Kumolus platform? 

Ho:  The Kumolus platform was designed to optimize public cloud costs. Now, with new vCenter support, customers can use a single pane of glass for comprehensive visibility into their on-premise environments as well. With the new Slack integration, customers can receive notifications about usage spikes or recommendations for more cost-effective actions. Kumolus also has sharpened the Azure savings recommendations by including more services, such as Public IP, unattached disks, and unattached snapshots.

VMblog:  What else do these new capabilities do for your customers?  What other challenges do they help them overcome?

Ho:  Progressively moving towards an integrated, holistic and comprehensive cloud service platform will ensure that we can complement customers' existing investments and accelerate their path to whatever end goals they've defined. Whether that's solving complex integration challenges, upgrading from vRA7 to vRA8, or making DevOps tools like Terraform and Kubernetes work better for their teams, these new capabilities help customers deliver on their KPIs while remaining in compliance.

VMblog:  Decentralization seems to be a buzzword in multiple industries lately.  Is this a trend in cloud management, and if so, is your new release perpetuating it?

Ho:  The fact is, we've been decentralizing workforces and infrastructure for years. Since the public cloud entered the mainstream, we've seen an ebb and flow of workload movements - on- and-off prem, to and from public cloud providers, and some even landing with MSPs that can offset or augment internal resources.

COVID and new offerings like VMC on AWS, which bridge in-house knowledge gaps, are certainly not going to slow decentralization. What it really comes down to is providing cross-functional capabilities for collaboration, along with centralized control and visibility. If you're too centralized, you can stifle innovation; too much freedom, and you can compromise security. Attaining that balance and keeping it is crucial to rapid innovation and remaining competitive.

Thankfully, with all of the options on the market, companies don't have to default to a hammer-and-nail approach to digital transformation. Our new Winter release is helping customers stay decentralized to add more agility while maintaining control through comprehensive visibility and automation.

VMblog:  Do you have any insight as to what new types of capabilities we can expect in future releases?

Ho:  CloudBolt is extremely excited about the future. We're planning a full integration of our acquired technologies on a single platform, while still providing these capabilities in a modular fashion. There are very solid enterprise suites that organizations have invested in for a long time. Our goal is to provide customers with dynamic ways to augment those capabilities, in a very easy and consumable way, so that they can focus on accelerating innovations that are critical to their business. We know that no two enterprises are at the same point on their cloud adoption and integrations. We want to meet them wherever they are, simplifying and optimizing their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud journeys.

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