CloudBolt Software acquires SovLabs to help customers simplify their journey to the hybrid cloud

CloudBolt Software announced it has acquired SovLabs, an innovator of codeless integration technologies for hybrid cloud. This acquisition enables CloudBolt to better serve its growing base of global customers and the thousands of VMware vRealize customers as enterprises increasingly adopt new tools like HashiCorp Terraform, Kubernetes, ServiceNow, and more.

With SovLabs, CloudBolt instantly doubles its customer base, increases its employee headcount by 50%, and acquires SovLabs’ award-winning technology to advance CloudBolt’s cloud management vision. Coming on the heels of CloudBolt’s new CEO appointment, the SovLabs team joins CloudBolt with the acquisition.

According to 451 Research, 68% of enterprises executing digital transformation initiatives have declared hybrid cloud (integrated on-premises systems and off-premises cloud / hosted resources) as an explicit IT strategy. Despite this promise, organizations continue to face challenges around automating their infrastructure deployments.

Today, automation-related projects are rife with custom code, custom scripts, and custom integrations. This invariably leads to significant cost overruns and decreased agility.

According to the Standish Group, custom software is historically expensive (52% of projects cost 189% of their original estimate), and also time-consuming (organizations cancel 19% of their projects).

As organizations invest in tools like infrastructure-as-code (e.g., HashiCorp Terraform), container orchestrators (e.g., Kubernetes), and IT service management (e.g., ServiceNow) these challenges will intensify.

To tackle these issues, CloudBolt will use SovLabs’ codeless integrations to help its customers and vRealize customers to dramatically reduce the cost and project risk of custom coding automation workflows required by these new tools.

At the same time, as enterprises seek to enhance their hybrid cloud capabilities, they can utilize CloudBolt to help them visualize, secure, and optimize their resources and workloads.

“We are excited to bring the SovLabs team and its codeless integration technologies to CloudBolt,” said Jeff Kukowski, chief executive officer of CloudBolt.

“As a world-class VMware technology partner, SovLabs has deep expertise helping vRealize customers maximize the value of their automation projects. With the end of general support for vRealize Automation 7.x approaching, the combination of CloudBolt and SovLabs is in a great position to serve this important base who are looking to migrate to vRealize Automation 8 or invest in complementary cloud management capabilities.

“Moreover, as CloudBolt and vRealize customers–and enterprises at large–adopt tools like Terraform and Kubernetes for hybrid cloud, our vision of bringing together CloudBolt and SovLabs will help them to better build, deploy, and govern their workloads for the future.”

CloudBolt vision: Cloud management, without the pain of custom coding

In this emerging multi-tool world, CloudBolt’s integration of SovLabs advances the company’s ambitious vision of “cloud management, reimagined” through three key principles:

• Build: with SovLabs’ codeless integrations as the technology linchpin, enterprise IT teams (e.g., networking, security, etc.) will be able to publish their own services to centralize automation of their IT resources and extend them for use by multiple tools
• Deploy: owners of different cloud management tools–CloudBolt, vRealize, Terraform, Kubernetes, ServiceNow, and others–will be able to easily consume those services to leading to faster infrastructure provisioning and dramatic reduction of custom code
• Govern: as enterprises advance from private to hybrid cloud, cloud leaders can use CloudBolt’s portfolio of cost management and governance solutions to better visualize, secure, and optimize their workloads and containers across their environments

CloudBolt’s cloud management vision promises to deliver significant value for enterprises based on speed, flexibility, and simplicity. First, the addition of SovLabs will enable enterprise IT to build their own policies once and extend them–anywhere, anytime–dramatically increasing time-to-value and ROI.

Secondly, by using tools of their choice, enterprises will be able to achieve greater flexibility and reduce vendor lock-in. Finally, as enterprises deploy more workloads, they will be able to easily integrate with CloudBolt via lightweight APIs, instead of relying on monolithic solutions, for improved governance and cost management.

CloudBolt and SovLabs: Delivering speed and flexibility for enterprises

As CloudBolt advances toward its vision, the combined company is set up for strong, immediate success. The acquisition doubles CloudBolt’s engineering, sales, and services team and provides CloudBolt with a strong bench of VMware experts.

SovLabs is a VMware Technical Alliance Partner of the Year, Global Cloud Management and Automation Partner of the Year, and holds 150+ VMware certifications in data center virtualization and automation.

With 75% of CloudBolt’s customers on VMware, this will enable CloudBolt to better serve its customer base while helping new customers simplify their automation and governance challenges.

Similarly, SovLabs’ customers gain additional solutions from CloudBolt through a rich portfolio of hybrid cloud provisioning, cost management, and governance solutions to better meet their needs.

In addition, SovLabs gets access to a talented worldwide product and engineering teams to accelerate its codeless integration solutions for CloudBolt, VMware-based technologies and other tools as it helps its customers move toward hybrid cloud.

“This acquisition is a great outcome for SovLabs customers and for the overall market. We’re very excited about being part of CloudBolt and the Insight Partners portfolio,” said Dave Wasserman, chief executive officer of SovLabs.

“Our expertise lies in the ability to software-define complex integrations that enterprises need for successful automation projects. We solved this problem for vRealize Automation and are now bringing our capabilities to more tools.

“Our acquisition by CloudBolt allows us to support our customers and their growing tools of choice while expanding our capabilities to hybrid cloud orchestration and governance.”