Microsoft’s pursuit to become a primary cloud services provider, amid competition from Amazon and Google, is expected to include a fresh participant to the journey. According to a local Israeli publication Calcalist, the Redmond giant is mulling over the acquisition of cloud monitoring, analytics, and optimization solution provider Cloudyn. This transaction is expected to be in the ballpark of around $50 – $70 million.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv (Israel), Cloudyn was founded by a trio of co-founder – Vittaly Tavor, Boris Goldberg, Sharon Wagner – in 2012. The company’s SaaS (software-as-a-solution) platform enables enterprises to save manpower by automating the monitoring of their cloud assets, through data analytics and optimization.
The primary aim of Cloudyn is to empower businesses with cloud accountability, which means you’ll be in control of the consumption and expenditure of cloud services employed by you. It’ll provide you with necessary tools to garner real-time cloud data across various operational and financial metrics.
With Cloudyn, you gain highly granular, real-time visibility into consumption, cost and performance of your multi-platform, hybrid cloud based on financial and operational metrics accessed via a single panel.
Until date, Cloudyn’s journey has been supported by marquee investors, such as Carmel Ventures, RDseed, Titanium Investments and even from our homegrown IT firm Infosys ($4 million). It has scored close to $20 million in four fundraising rounds. Cloudyn serves thousands of customers, including Fortune 500 companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Gett, Tim Internet and Ticketmaster among others.
As for Microsoft, the company has steadily been increasing focus on its cloud services strategy since the appointment of Indian-born chief executive Satya Nadella. It was earlier focused on progressing its position in the market through its proprietary and widely used operating system – Windows. Ever since 2014, he has been reinventing the company to focus more on expanding its intelligent cloud and productivity solutions. He was previously spearheading the company’s cloud and enterprise efforts and the journey, it seems, has continued.
Nadella has not only diverted attention to the rapidly scaling Azure cloud platform and Office 365 productivity suite but also changed the approach towards delivering Windows to its users. Microsoft is no longer releasing feature-loaded iterations with a new number. Instead, the company has now converted it into a software solution, where Windows 10 is delivered as an iterative update over the air to everyone who has already purchased the operating system once.
Microsoft’s aggressive focus on these business has helped it score massively in its quarterly earnings. The revenue in productivity and business, which includes Office and CRM services grew 6 percent to $6.7 billion in Q1 2017. The dynamics and cloud services revenue also grew 11 percent. Azure peaked the charts and showed tremendous growth. As compared to the previous quarter, overall revenue of intelligent cloud services rose 8 percent to amount to $6.4 billion. This was led by 116 percent growth in Azure revenues, which is massive for its competition against the beefier AWS. Analysts estimate Azure to contribute $2.7 billion to the overall revenue of 2016.
We’ve contacted both the technology giants for a comment on the rumors. A Cloudyn spokesperson has reached out to us saying that the cloud solutions provider has been approached and has been having discussions with several global industry leaders. But, it added that no agreement or contractual document has been signed as of yet. We’re still waiting to hear back from Microsoft.
