Accounting start-up Cloudability has acquired data visualisation service provider DataHero, another cloud start-up that formed at about the same time.
Oregon-based Cloudability’s growth came from helping companies track their spending on public cloud infrastructure. It announced the addition of San Francisco based DataHero on the company blog and hailed the extension of its presence 500 miles away in California.
However, while 12 of DataHero’s staff are to join Cloudability, its founder and CEO Chris Neumann will not join, neither will the company’s CFO, engineering VP or the VP for marketing. DataHero will continue to operate as normal for the foreseeable future until it can be integrated into the CloudAbility portfolio.
CloudAbility CEO Mat Ellis said the process will involve building a connector to make it easier for its clients to use DataHero to ingest different information streams, such as invoices from Zuora and conversions from Google Analytics, into Cloudability. The upshot, he said, is to help clients see what’s happening in their business and get a sense of the business costs that matter, such as the IT cost per new customer or the unit contribution margin after the cost of goods sold. The technology matters to cloud users because it helps companies save money on research and development as it brings them the best of both products in one service. “We both have an awesome dashboard which cost a lot of money to get right,” said Ellis. “Now there’s no need to do that twice.”
As the cloud makes it harder for managers to get a clear picture of their asset performances, the data visualisation market has entered a period of consolidation. Salesforce bought EdgeSpring, Zendesk bought BIME, Microsoft bought Datazen and Cloudability previously acquired DataPad. Cloudability has also acquired start ups in other areas such as CloudVertical, RipFog and Attribo.
DataHero had previously raised $10 million in venture funding, the latest award of $6.1 million being announced in May 2015.
“As companies spend more to run applications on public clouds, managing that cloud spending becomes increasingly urgent, difficult and risk prone,” wrote Ellis on his own blog. “Mastering the cloud at scale requires us to think about spending in a completely new way.”
Instead of asking macro economic questions about how much IT is costing every year, the new challenge is to provide micro-economic detail about the cost of every activity, he argued. “We should ask the cost of almost anything: each web page served, widget sold, ride taken across town or flight to the other side of the planet,” he said.
The cost of the DataHero acquisition was not released.