There are a lot of reasons for companies to use more than one cloud computing infrastructure provider. A multivendor strategy enables them to take advantage of deals and discounts, shift workloads to the most appropriate platform and leverage the unique strength and tools of each provider.

But going multicloud adds to complexity, and that’s where CloudHealth Technologies Inc. comes in. The Boston-based software company has raised $85 million in financing, including a recent $46 million round from blue-chip investors to grow its management platform that aggregates, correlates and analyzes data from disparate cloud providers so that customers can better manage budgets, service levels and workloads across multiple clouds.

Last month, the company used some of those funds to hire veteran software executive Tom Axbey as chief executive. “I’m fascinated by the cloud and how transformative it is to business,” said Axbey, who most recently turned around and sold the government-focused alert service Rave Mobile Safety Inc. “The role was very akin to experiences I’ve had in my career selling infrastructure software.” Axbey joined SiliconANGLE recently for a video interview at SiliconANGLE’s bureau in Marlborough, Mass.

One of CloudHealth’s investors likened the company’s business to “Tivoli for the cloud,” referring to IBM Corp.’s systems management arm. “That resonated with me as brilliant because it was so simple,” said Axbey, who once worked at Tivoli Systems Inc. “Enterprises that migrate to the cloud want the same governance and management that they had in the data center.”

Single pane

CloudHealth taps into the data sources that cloud providers provide to continually gather information that gives its customers “a single pane of glass to help manage and optimize their cloud experience,” Axbey said. That includes public cloud, private cloud and cloud-based software-as-a-service.

“You’ve got all these vendors all over the world increasing their service offerings at a rapid pace, so just keeping up to speed with the necessary domain expertise is very complex,” he said. “I mean, Amazon does per-second billing now. Multiply that by a multicloud or a hybrid cloud, and aggregating that data becomes a business-critical task.”

For information technology managers accustomed to having tight controls and visibility within the data center, “the cloud is like the Wild West,” Axbey said. CloudHealth helps them gain the same kind on insight into their cloud usage that they’re accustomed to on-premises. The vendor can also help them allocate those costs by department or geography as well as better understand usage patterns for load-balancing and time-of-day provisioning. The data also helps in configuration management and security, he said.

Such services may appear to be a bit at odds with the interests of cloud providers, who would rather have customer exclusivity, but Axbey said working with the vendors hasn’t been a problem. “We’re accelerating customers’ movement to the cloud by offering them the same visibility, governance and tools that they had in their private data center,” he said, “and the cloud vendors already know it’s going to be a multicloud environment for larger customers in particular.”

Although cloud companies may evolve to offer services that are similar to CloudHealth’s, Axbey believes there will always be a need for neutral third parties. The company plans to expand its 180-person workforce to more than 420 by the end of 2018. Being Boston-based is an advantage to high-growth tech companies, he said. “Boston has got an immense talent pool coming out every year from universities, and that talent pool now wants to stay in Boston,” he said. “They know Boston is a great place to be.”

Even in winter.

Image: theCUBE