“plan their entire cloud ecosystem,” Phillips says, and “optimize their performance and cost from a business perspective,” whether they are slicing the data by customer, product, department, or what have you.
In particular, CloudHealth customers can do things like figure out their cost per customer in different product tiers; analyze not just computing capacity but also customer data and billing information; and dissect trends over time in IT, finance, and engineering. Phillips refers to that last bit as “long-term trending” of a company’s cloud environment.
“We pull and collect data from the entire cloud ecosystem,” says Phillips. “Our tool produces business reports that [software as a service] companies will use in weekly staff meetings, and in board meetings.”
The startup has a few customers already, and other companies are testing out the software. Phillips is selling to software companies with annual revenues ranging from roughly $1 million to $50 million—the bigger they are, the more critical a management tool CloudHealth will become, he says.
Other companies in cloud infrastructure and tools would include RightScale, Newvem, and (around Boston) Stackdriver, Yottaa, and Cloudant. And, of course, the big guys like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, CA, and Compuware. Yet CloudHealth’s competitors tend to be more focused on system-administrator-level tools or application management, Phillips says.
CloudHealth has seven employees and is looking to hire 15 more in the next 12 months, Phillips says. The company is about to move into office space in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston.
Whether people will see past (or be confused by) the firm’s name depends on how successful CloudHealth becomes, of course. “As the industry matures, I think people will immediately relate ‘Health’ to that long-term trending,” he says.
