Betting that multi-cloud complexity is becoming a time sink for corporate IT administrators, CloudBolt Software, Inc. is bulking up its namesake platform for virtual machine (VM) self-provisioning. The three-year-old company has a new CEO in Jon Mittelhauser, co-developer of the first Windows Web browser and a co-founder of Netscape Communications Corp., and is boasting of tenfold growth in recurring revenue last year.

CloudBolt addresses what Mittelhauser said is growing demand by IT organizations to enable end-users to spin up their own cloud VMs rather than going through the time-consuming and expensive process of requesting them through an administrator. CloudBolt is an abstraction layer that works with most major on-premise and public cloud providers as well as development and automation tools like Chef Software, Inc.’s Chef and Puppet Labs, Inc. Puppet to enable self-service while giving IT a full range of tracking and reporting tools. The company claims it has seen customers in the field cut average deployment times from two weeks to less than five minutes.

“People have hit the pain point where managing all these different clouds has become a nightmare,” said Mittelhauser, who came aboard five months ago to raise CloudBolt’s visibility. “We give them IT command and control while end-users get the ability to provision their own VMs and hide the complexity. “

Mittelhauser cited an ideal use case as being one in which a sales team needs to create a string of virtual machines to host a webcast demo and then automatically spin down the VMs a couple of hours later. CloudBolt’s support for scripting makes this easy, he said. CloudBolt can also be used for discovery purposes to reduce VM sprawl and to compare vendor bills against actual usage.

CloudBolt has actually been around since 2012 but has largely flown under the radar, Mittelhauser said. The company got its start in the government business but today claims Fortune 20-sized enterprise customers managing as many as 15,000 VMs.

Enhancements in the new release include new service catalog functionality for complex, multi-tier app deployments; provisioning of service catalog blueprints through both the CloudBolt web interface and a REST API; improved out-of-the box integration with popular cloud platforms; and the ability for DevOps experts to create one-button shortcuts for performing complex server tasks.

CloudBolt pricing starts at $12,500 per year for a 100-VM installation, but Mittelhauser said average deals are in the $50,000-$100,000 range.
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