Microsoft Buys Cloudyn To Provide Visibility For Azure Customers

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Cloudyn, a company that helps enterprises and managed service providers optimise their investments in cloud services, for a fee believed to be between $50-70million (£38-45m).

Businesses are now frequently rolling out multiple cloud projects at the same time, meaning gaining visibility across all of these projects and understanding the costs has become more of a challenge.

The Cloudyn acquisition will help to solve this problem for Azure customers by enabling them to manage their cloud usage and provide a deeper level of visibility into factors such as consumption, cost and performance.

Big spender

“This acquisition fits squarely into our commitment to empower customers with the tools they need to govern their cloud adoption and realise the strategic benefits of a global, trusted, intelligent cloud,” writes Jeremy Winter, director of Azure security and operations management.

“Cloudyn gives enterprise customers tools to identify, measure and analyse consumption, enable accountability and forecast future cloud spending.”

Cloudyn has previously been a partner of Microsoft, working on Microsoft Azure and other public clouds to help customers improve their efficiency through automated monitoring, analytics and cost allocation.

The company’s technology will be incorporated into Microsoft’s Azure product portfolio, assuming the acquisition receives regulatory approval.

Cloudyn founder and CEO Sharon Wagner said he was “stoked” to be joining Microsoft to “continue our mission of optimising cloud efficiencies and investments”.

This acquisition follows on from Microsoft’s recent $100 million (£77m) purchase of cyber security firm Hexadite, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automatically respond to cyber attacks.

Earlier in the year the Redmond giant also acquired Montreal-based startup Maluuba to boost its AI and machine learning expertise, highlighting a trend which was further bolstered by the company’s investment in two other AI startups through its Ventures division.

So, Microsoft is being bullish on AI but this Cloudyn acquisition shows that its cloud focus will not be easing as Satya Nadella and co. look to keep pace with market leader AWS.

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