CloudBolt To Buy Aussie Startup Kumolus To Deepen Multi-Cloud Management Chops

August 27, 2020, 09:00 AM EDT

The startup’s second acquisition looks to boost its standing in the red-hot and wide-open cloud management landscape with continuous security and cost monitoring across public and hybrid clouds.

CloudBolt revealed on Thursday a deal to purchase Kumolus, an Australian provider of multi-cloud management solutions.

While there’s overlap in the two companies’ product lines, Kumolus, based in Melbourne, will enhance the CloudBolt platform with deeper capabilities around continuous security and cost monitoring, especially for public and hybrid cloud environments, CloudBolt CEO Jeff Kukowski told CRN.

“We have great capabilities, but there’s a difference in the nature of being able to set up static guardrails and being able to do it on a continuous basis in the public cloud,” Kukowski said.

The companies did not disclose the financials of the deal.

As with SovLabs earlier this summer, Insight Partners, CloudBolt’s private equity backer, played a large role in identifying Kumolus as an acquisition target that could immediately boost CloudBolt’s standing in a rapidly emerging and wide-open market for cloud management platforms.

Kumolus “not only does cost, but deals with a lot of issues you face in going deeper in these public cloud environments,” Kukowski said. That includes single or multi-cloud management and automation, day two operations, security, and compliance.

In addition to those expanded capabilities, Kumolus extends the reach of Rockville, MD.-headquartered CloudBolt into the Asia-Pacific market, he said.

Kumolus, which does much of its business through MSPs, works across all major public clouds, and offers unique Amazon Web Services management as a holder of the AWS Competency Program certification.

CloudBolt was particularly attracted to Kumolus’ ability to empower engineering and security teams through visualization tools that display the type and severity of threats posed to machines and services running on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Visualization is important, Kukowski said, as “companies using the cloud are doing thousands of changes per day.

“Everybody is trying to save money and it’s not as easy as people think,” he told CRN.

Kumolus employs almost 50 people in Australia who will bring the total CloudBolt workforce to around 170 once the deal receives regulatory approvals.

“We’re buying the team and technology,” Kukowski told CRN. “They’re fantastic.”