Cloudability CEO Mat Ellis
Cloudability, the Portland, Ore.-startup that seeks to help companies manage their spending across clouds, just landed $ 8.7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by The Foundry Group and included contributions from 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and ad firm Wieden + Kennedy.
The money will be used to add as many connections to third-party applications as possible, said Cloudability CEO Mat Ellis in a recent interview. “We already have 100 vendor integrations and we want to get to 500 by the end of the year.”
The cash will add features and beef up the “Tribes” feature that lets companies tell how many people in each department are using what services. The company will staff up to achieve both goals with Ellis expecting to double the 15-person headcount in a year. Cloudability is adding Jason Mendelson, managing director for Foundry Group, and Jason Seats, managing director of Tech Stars Cloud and the founder of Slicehost, to its board of directors.
Cloudability attacks a big problem faced by companies flocking to infrastructure as a service clouds like Amazon and Rackspace as well as SaaS offerings like Salesforce.com. Since developers spin up cloud instances with their credit cards and departments authorize use of SaaS applications, there is often little central control or visibility into exactly which cloud services are in use and by whom.
That makes it hard to make sure that all licenses are being used before buying additional seats. Cloudability promises to bring all that activity into one management pane so it can be monitored and adjusted as needed.
“Many companies use Mailchimp to import a load of users for one big [email] push and then don’t use it again for six months while still paying top-tier pricing. We can tell you which departments are using it, which are recycling seats and which are no longer using it so you can adjust your level of service,” Ellis said.
He also said the company will make good on its “free beer” for referrals program once it works out the legalities. Some states do not allow shipment of beer to private parties.
Cloudability is going after a big potential market — the company claims 3,000 users with $ 120 million in cloud spend under management now. But it doesn’t have it to itself: Competitors include Newvem, Cloudyn and UptimeCloud. Because Cloudability focuses on all the major clouds — Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid etc. — it’s in a good position as more companies evaluate multi-cloud deployments in the wake of major Amazon outages in the past month.
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