Cloud Cruiser Raises $6M From ONSET Ventures To Help Companies Get Their Cloud Costs Under Control

It seems like everyone is moving their IT into the cloud, but very few organizations have a real good sense of how much money they’re actually spending there — or how much money they could be saving by optimizing their costs. That’s a problem Cloud Cruiser is looking to solve, by giving companies a comprehensive dashboard to see and manage all their cloud resources. To do so, the company has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by ONSET Ventures and added ONSET founder Terry Opdendyk to its board of directors.

Founded in 2010, Cloud Cruiser has built a management platform that integrates with existing enterprise cloud services, keeping a running tally of all the services that a company is using and allowing businesses to lower costs by optimizing usage. Businesses can set budgets and track spend across the entire organization, tying services to individual users or groups. That lets enterprises get very granular reports about where their money is going and get alerts when spending hits certain thresholds.

The first step in the process is connecting to the services that enterprises are using and providing a layer of transparency across all public and private cloud services. Enterprises can then sign up for new cloud services directly from the dashboard, then allocate them to specific users within an organization. They can also use the platform for chargeback of cloud services used.

Cloud Cruiser founders Dave Zabrowski and Greg Howard have deep backgrounds in networking technologies. Zabrowski was previously GM of HP’s enterprise business, and also CEO of network virtualization company Neterion before joining Wavepoint Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. And Howard was Director of Development for CIMS Lab, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. He specializes in building chargeback systems for large organizations.

Cloud services are already a huge business, but we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. Forrester estimates that only about 3 percent of IT spend happens in the cloud today, but it’s going to very rapidly ramp up over the coming years. By 2016, the research company expects about half of all IT spend to move to the cloud.

Today, Cloud Cruiser has more than 200 end customers using its system, but the funding comes as it’s struck a number of new partnerships over the last few months. It’s partnered with HP to deliver chargeback for its HP CloudSystem offering, as well as Microsoft for its SystemCenter cloud product. And it’s struck a reseller agreement with Seamless Technologies to get even more traction.

In addition to ONSET, existing Cloud Cruiser investor Wavepoint Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of $7.6 million since being founded.