Mix-and-match cloud services have become “la mode du jour,” as companies adopt multicloud strategies that enable picking and choosing providers and services to match specific workload needs.

“In the last 24 months, enterprises went from being a single cloud to pervasive multicloud,” said Joe Kinsella (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of cloud management platform company CloudHealth Technologies Inc. “It’s a very complex heterogeneous portfolio they’re managing.”

Kinsella spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder cloud and infrastructure at Jumbo Supermarkten, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed how VMware Inc.’s intended acquisition of Boston-based CloudHealth Technologies will benefit both companies. (* Disclosure below.)

Making cloud part of delivering business services

Eight years ago, CloudHealth was a public cloud pioneer, Kinsella explained. And because of the massive complexity and amount of tools required to efficiently deploy and manage cloud infrastructure at the time, he saw a need for a simple, single platform solution.

“I set out with CloudHealth to build a single [software as a service] platform that customers could use — what today you might call build out a cloud center of excellence — which is to have one central platform where you can centralize and distribute cost management, security compliance, as well as proactive governance, all the way to integrating back into your back office and your service desk and your incident management,” Kinsella said.

His prescience paid off, and CloudHealth found itself perfectly positioned as multicloud gained popularity. “If you’re going to build out a cloud center of excellence across a pervasively heterogeneous environment, you need a single platform that does that for you,” he said.

The CloudHealth platform supports Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and, of course, VMware. “It integrates directly into vSphere [server virtualization software], does cost management, does inventory, visibility, as well as migration recommendations to and from multiple different public clouds,” Kinsella stated.

Being acquired by another company wasn’t originally part of CloudHealth’s plans, as it was building itself as a public company in its own right. However, partnership talks with VMware led to the two companies realizing they shared cultural synergy, vision and strategies.

“Somewhere along the way we realized this made a lot of sense,” said Kinsella, who describes how the CloudHealth brand will become a core brand of VMware, “integrating across various different properties across [VMware’s] SaaS portfolio.”

“There’s just huge potential synergies between what we do and how we can extend our value proposition into those areas much faster as part of VMware. As the founder of the company, what excited me about this was this was not taking me away from my vision. It was an opportunity to accelerate my vision,” Kinsella concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE