With VMware, Inc.’s Vsphere owning more than half of the on-premise virtualization market, the people at HotLink Corp. have a simple proposition: Why not use VMware’s VCenter console to manage an entire hybrid cloud ecosystem?

The company today is rolling out a cloud management platform that promises to unite management of major public and private cloud platforms under a single console based upon vCenter. Called Cloud Management Express, the platform manages Microsoft Azure, VMware VCloud Air, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services EC2 platforms in the public cloud, as well as OpenStack, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat, Inc. KVM and Xen cloud platforms behind the firewall.

Acting as an extension to vCenter, Cloud Management Express abstracts the various hybrid platforms and workloads and treats them like vSphere hosts and virtual machines, mapping vSphere commands to each platform’s native syntax and consolidating systems management information in a single console. It’s designed to download and install quickly and discover existing clouds with minimal setup. “All of our products are packaged solutions with minor support over the phone,” said Jerry McLeod, VP of Business Development at HotLink.

HotLink is targeting a growing hybrid market that many analysts believe will dominate the cloud landscape within a few years. In its newly released Public Cloud Market Forecast 2015-2026, Wikibon stated that, “In the long term [hybrid cloud] is likely to become the cloud approach of choice” for enterprises. International Data Corp. forecasts that 65% of enterprises will adopt hybrid clouds by next year.

That introduces complexity because each cloud platform has its own management console and commands. Cloud Management Express aims to be a simple way to pull all those systems together.  Its auto-discovery mechanism maps an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure within a couple of hours and can even be used to discover VMs that are unknown to IT.

“When you add a host, we log on, auto-discover what you have running and show you all your VMs, networking, storage, CPU and memory,” McLeod said. “You can power on and power of, create new VMs, add disk, memory and provision from templates. You get all of the alarms and alerts right from vCenter.”

Permissions defined in vCenter can also be automatically extended to other supported cloud platforms.  The software can’t move workloads from one virtual machine to another but can adjust workloads dynamically with a VM, McLeod said.

Cloud Management Express supports all vCenter templates and scripts out of the box. In the case of exceptions in which a target cloud platform uses commands that aren’t support in vCenter, users can define hyperlinks that are unique to those commands.

The software is sold on a per-managed-virtual-machine basis with prices starting at $175 per VM in a bundle of 150 instances for a basic package.