CloudHealth

CloudHealth, now part of VMware by Broadcom, aims to be the most trusted software platform for accelerating global business transformation in the cloud. Its primary goal is to simplify financial management, streamline operations, and improve cross-organizational collaboration for enterprises utilizing multi-cloud environments. CloudHealth provides a unified view for managing cloud resources, offering insights to track usage, enforce policies, and identify cost savings.

CloudHealth is recognized for its capabilities in cloud cost management and FinOps, helping organizations optimize their cloud investments. The platform is designed to provide visibility, optimization, and governance across various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. While established as a comprehensive solution, some market perspectives suggest that the pace of innovation has slowed since its acquisition by VMware, particularly in areas like Kubernetes cost visibility and advanced automation.

Offerings, Capabilities, and Integrations

CloudHealth by VMware is a multi-cloud management platform designed to help organizations simplify financial management, streamline operations, and improve collaboration across their cloud environments. It provides visibility, optimization, and governance for resources across public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Alibaba Cloud, as well as private cloud (vSphere-based) and data center workloads. This comprehensive view allows businesses to manage and analyze cloud data from a single source of truth. Key capabilities include cost management and optimization, reporting and dashboards, budget management, forecasting, rightsizing, commitment-based discount management, anomaly detection, Kubernetes optimization, governance and automation, migration planning, and GreenOps. These features enable users to track cloud consumption, allocate costs, identify savings opportunities, and automate cloud operations.

CloudHealth’s ability to provide a unified view across diverse cloud and on-premises environments, coupled with robust financial management and operational automation tools, gives it a competitive edge. The platform’s focus on FinOps principles helps organizations align cloud spending with business objectives. CloudHealth integrates with various third-party tools for application performance management, provisioning, configuration management, security management, and data analytics, such as New Relic, Datadog, Ansible, Chef, Slack, and VMware Aria Operations. These integrations enhance visibility and control, allowing CloudHealth to serve as a central hub for multi-cloud management.

Products and Services

CloudHealth’s primary offering is its CloudHealth Platform, also referred to as VMware Tanzu CloudHealth or formerly VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. This platform is the core engine for its multi-cloud management capabilities. A specialized version, the CloudHealth Partner Platform, is designed for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to manage their customers’ cloud environments, streamline billing, and deliver value-added services.

• CloudHealth Platform (VMware Tanzu CloudHealth): This is the flagship product, providing comprehensive multi-cloud management. It focuses on simplifying financial management, streamlining operations, and improving organizational collaboration across multi-cloud environments. Key functionalities include:
  • Cost Management & Optimization: Tools to analyze cloud usage and spending, offering recommendations for cost reduction through rightsizing, reserved instance management, and waste elimination. This includes features for budget tracking, cost allocation, and chargeback.
  • Reporting and Dashboards: Customizable reports and dashboards to visualize cloud data, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and analyze trends across business objectives. FlexReports offer advanced, customizable reporting capabilities.
  • Governance and Automation: A policy engine to define and enforce best practices for cost control, security compliance, and operational efficiency through automation. This includes automated actions like terminating unused resources or alerting on budget thresholds.
  • Rightsizing and Waste Reduction: Identifies underutilized resources and provides actionable recommendations for optimizing IaaS and PaaS services. Recent enhancements include rightsizing for services like Amazon S3, Azure SQL DB, Redshift, DynamoDB, EBS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Kubernetes requests, and Azure VMs.
  • Commitment-Based Discount Management: Capabilities for purchasing, optimizing, and amortizing cloud provider commitment discounts like AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
  • Anomaly Detection: Identifies unexpected changes in cloud spend by region, account, and service.
  • Kubernetes Optimization: Tools to improve the performance and cost-efficiency of Kubernetes environments.
  • Migration Planning: Assesses and models workloads for migration to the cloud, providing total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis.
  • GreenOps: Provides insights into energy consumption and carbon emissions for cloud resources, helping organizations track and reduce their environmental impact. A GreenOps Operational Emissions Dashboard and FlexReport dataset were recently released.
  • Security and Compliance: While core FinOps capabilities remain in Tanzu CloudHealth, some security-focused features were integrated into VMware Aria Operations for Secure Clouds (formerly CloudHealth Secure State). Tanzu CloudHealth still enables policy-driven governance for security.
• CloudHealth Partner Platform: Tailored for MSPs, this platform provides a centralized console to manage multiple customer tenants, simplify billing, and offer branded cloud management services. It helps MSPs improve efficiency, monetize their public cloud business, and increase margins.
• FinOps Service: CloudHealth also offers consultation services for implementing FinOps principles, providing tailored guidance for identifying cost-saving opportunities and enhancing efficiency in customers’ cloud environments.

Recent product updates in 2023 included a modernized ML-based forecasting engine, enhancements to FlexReports with new datasets and templates, support for event-driven data collection for faster asset visibility, and expanded rightsizing recommendations for various AWS and Azure services. New policy actions for automated usage optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP were also introduced. The GreenOps capabilities, including an operational emissions dashboard, are also a newer addition.

Target Customers

CloudHealth targets a broad range of customers, from large enterprises to Managed Service Providers (MSPs), that operate in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments. The platform is designed for organizations looking to gain visibility, control costs, optimize resources, and ensure governance across their cloud infrastructure. CloudHealth is utilized by over 22,000 organizations worldwide.

Specific market segments and company types include:

• Enterprises: Large organizations, particularly those with complex multi-cloud strategies (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, private cloud) and significant cloud spend, leverage CloudHealth to manage financial operations, optimize usage, and maintain governance. This includes companies in sectors like financial services, healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, and retail. These enterprises benefit from features like detailed cost allocation, budget management, rightsizing recommendations, and compliance policy enforcement.
• Managed Service Providers (MSPs): CloudHealth offers a dedicated Partner Platform for MSPs, enabling them to deliver cloud management services to their clients. MSPs use CloudHealth to manage multiple customer tenants, streamline billing, provide customized reporting, and offer value-added services like cost optimization and security assessments. This helps MSPs enhance their service portfolios and improve profitability.
• Public Sector Organizations: CloudHealth provides multi-cloud management solutions tailored to the specific needs and compliance requirements of public sector entities.
• Companies with FinOps Practices: Organizations adopting FinOps methodologies to manage their cloud financial operations use CloudHealth to improve cross-organizational collaboration, drive accountability for cloud spending, forecast budgets, optimize costs, and implement governance policies.

These target customers benefit from CloudHealth by gaining a centralized view of their entire cloud estate, which simplifies management and reduces tool sprawl. They can achieve significant cost savings (on average 25% monthly cost savings reported by some sources) through optimization recommendations and automated policies. Furthermore, CloudHealth helps these organizations improve operational efficiency, reduce risk, and align their cloud strategy with overall business objectives.

Cloud Integrations and Marketplaces

CloudHealth by VMware is a multi-cloud management platform that integrates with several major cloud providers to help organizations simplify financial management, optimize operations, and ensure security and compliance. CloudHealth also has a presence on various cloud marketplaces, facilitating easier procurement for customers.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Integration: CloudHealth integrates with AWS to provide visibility, cost management, and governance for AWS environments. This allows users to analyze spending, optimize resource utilization, manage reservations, and automate operational tasks within their AWS infrastructure. CloudHealth can ingest data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and integrate with AWS Single Sign-On (SSO).
• Microsoft Azure Integration: CloudHealth supports Microsoft Azure, enabling customers to manage their Azure environment, optimize costs, track usage, and improve governance. It offers capabilities for visualizing Azure assets, managing Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, and integrating with Microsoft Entra ID for single sign-on. CloudHealth can connect to Azure Service Principal to gather necessary data.
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Integration: CloudHealth provides management capabilities for Google Cloud, offering visibility into resource usage and costs, and helping to reclaim underutilized resources. It integrates with various GCP services and APIs, including Compute Engine, Cloud Billing, and BigQuery, to collect data for analysis and optimization.
• Other Integrations: Beyond the major cloud providers, CloudHealth also integrates with other services and tools. These include VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) for data center workload visibility, Datadog for enhanced performance metrics, and New Relic for infrastructure monitoring. CloudHealth also supports integrations with tools like Chef and offers API access for custom integrations.

Regarding cloud marketplace presence:

• AWS Marketplace: CloudHealth by VMware is available on the AWS Marketplace. This allows customers to procure CloudHealth through their existing AWS accounts and potentially consolidate billing. As of May 2024, Arrow Electronics was announced as the sole global provider for Broadcom’s CloudHealth from VMware offering, with availability through the ArrowSphere Cloud marketplace, while ensuring no planned service outage for customers consuming CloudHealth via the AWS marketplace.
• Microsoft Azure Marketplace: CloudHealth is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This provides Azure customers with a streamlined way to purchase and deploy CloudHealth to manage their Azure and multi-cloud environments.
• Google Cloud Marketplace: A search for “CloudHealth” on the Google Cloud Marketplace (https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/browse?q=CloudHealth) does not yield a direct listing for the CloudHealth platform itself. While other VMware and related services may be present, CloudHealth as a distinct offering for managing Google Cloud (or multi-cloud) environments is not explicitly listed on the Google Cloud Marketplace based on the provided search URL. However, CloudHealth does integrate with Google Cloud Platform for management and optimization.

Key People

• Senior Vice President and General Manager, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom: Krish Prasad.
• Vice President of Products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom: Paul Turner.
• Vice President of Marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom: Prashanth Shenoy.
• Vice president and General Manager, Tanzu Division, Broadcom: Purnima Padmanabhan (Note: This was a role associated with CloudHealth’s business unit; recent information indicates a partnership with Arrow for Tanzu CloudHealth go-to-market).
• Product Leader at Tanzu CloudHealth: Cathal Cleary.
• Senior Product Line Manager at CloudHealth: Lucas Paratore.

Key Facts

• Headquarters Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• Number of Employees: Approximately 501.
• Annual Revenue: $750M.
• Parent Company: Broadcom Inc. (via VMware).
• Subsidiary Companies: None (CloudHealth is a product line/brand within VMware, which is a subsidiary of Broadcom).
• Publicly Listed: No (Parent company Broadcom Inc. is publicly listed).

Analyst Recognition

CloudHealth, now VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, has been recognized by multiple analyst firms for its capabilities in cloud financial management and FinOps.

• Gartner: VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (referred to as Broadcom) was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Financial Management Tools. Gartner recognized CloudHealth for its full-cycle FinOps capabilities, supporting organizations of all maturity levels and partners delivering cloud and FinOps services. CloudHealth was also identified in the 2024 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Financial Management Tools. In 2020, Gartner noted that CloudHealth (as part of VMware) received high marks from its customers for cost management and workload optimization and had the most customers versus any other product evaluated in that research for Cloud Management Platforms. CloudHealth Technologies was also named a “Cool Vendor” in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2016” report.
• Forrester: Broadcom’s VMware Tanzu CloudHealth was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q3 2024. Forrester stated that CloudHealth “remains a stalwart leader and one of the de facto solutions in this space.” The report highlighted CloudHealth’s superior access and permissions with its FlexOrgs capabilities and depth in reporting and monitoring. Forrester Consulting also conducted studies on behalf of CloudHealth Technologies related to public cloud migration success and the state of the cloud for Managed Service Providers.
• IDC: Broadcom (VMware Tanzu CloudHealth) was recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Cloud Cost and Capacity Optimization 2024 Vendor Assessment. In 2022, IDC ranked VMware No. 1 in worldwide cloud cost transparency software based on calendar year 2020 revenues, crediting VMware’s acquisition of CloudHealth and its customer base. IDC noted VMware’s investment in improving the ease of use and reducing the effort enterprises need to implement cost-saving recommendations from the CloudHealth solution.
• Everest Group: While specific recognitions for CloudHealth by Everest Group were not found in the provided search snippets, Everest Group does conduct research and assessments in related areas such as FinOps and cloud cost management. For example, they published a FinOps Cloud Cost Management Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment in 2024. Other companies have been recognized by Everest Group in areas like Healthcare Industry Cloud Services and Patient and Member Engagement Platforms.