CloudHealth Channel Chief: We're ‘Better Together' With VMware

Virtualization giant VMware Monday said it will acquire CloudHealth Technologies to marry its data center and virtualization expertise with multi-cloud management.

CloudHealth, founded in 2012, boosted its sales through the channel by two-thirds over the past year. And the cloud management provider has no plans of slowing down now that it will be part of VMware, executives told CRN at CloudHealth's grand opening of its new Boston-based headquarters Thursday.

"We became a cloud-first company, and it's the same story with VMware -- it's a better-together story," CloudHealth’s senior director of channel sales, Bob Kilbride, said.

[Related: VMware CEO: CloudHealth Acquisition Puts Public Cloud Platform Ahead]

CloudHealth's technology lets businesses control and analyze the costs, compliance and performance of their cloud environments, whether it’s a private or public cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Channel partners also can use the platform in a multi-tenant fashion to monitor and control their end customers' cloud environments.

At VMworld 2018 Monday, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that the company will offer a new, CloudHealth-branded cloud platform that VMware Cloud Provider Program partners and MSPs will be able to sell.

Together with VMware, CloudHealth will offer the multi-cloud management piece, while VMware focuses on enterprise data center and virtualization.

"I see it as all about acceleration and additional integration," Kilbride said. "The fact that VMware is focused on multi-cloud, as are we, is really great alignment. It's really the next wave of cloud expansion."

It's still too early to determine whether CloudHealth partners will become part of VMware's channel program, or if CloudHealth will continue to operate its own channel program once the deal is closed, Kilbride said.

The acquisition will not only help CloudHealth expand globally, but it will also help VMware close the gap between the data center and virtualization market and the cloud market, said Melodye Mueller, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances for CloudHealth.

"By putting the two forces together, you can have a single platform that has the ability to take data and bridge both of those environments," she said.

Kilbride said that the acquisition will "only strengthen" CloudHealth's partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google.

According to an April report from Forrester Research, 91 percent of enterprise IT buyers said they use two or more vendors’ public cloud environments, with 19 percent of respondents saying they use between six and nine.

"Multi-cloud is real," Kilbride said. "It's going to be a requirement and [partners] can't do it alone. They need a solution stack."

VMware said it expects the acquisition to close this quarter. CloudHealth, which has nearly 300 employees, will continue to operate in Boston.