糖心视频

Morning Markets: Apptio picks up Cloudability, making its 2018 acquisition pace seem less like a fluke.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

, a SaaS company focused on helping companies manage their IT life, today that it is buying , a smaller firm that helps clients manage their cloud spend. Seems like a simple enough match.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

What makes the acquisition interesting is that Apptio appears to be picking up the pace of its startup purchases. Indeed, the Cloudability deal marks Apptio’s since the start of 2018, but just its fourth known acquisition since its first back in 2012:

The increase isn’t too surprising. Apptio went public in 2016, a deal that valued the company at around $872 million according to Crunchbase data. However, unlike many companies from that period, Apptio did not stay a public company. Instead, it was by private-equity shop for $1.94 billion in November of 2018.

So, Apptio has been on our minds recently.

Turning to Cloudability, the Portland, Oregon-based company was rounded in 2011, during its life as a private shop. The exit could be a nice result for Portland, the very first tech scene that I worked in. I retain a fondness for both the city and the people (shout-out to ,听 , et al).

But even more, Cloudability’s exit to the currently-private Apptio is part of something larger. Read what IT-focused on the deal:

Companies that optimize cloud spending are likely to become key acquisition targets. For instance,听. In addition, cloud customers are often聽聽after first getting hit by sticker shock.聽 are trying to get a handle on cloud costs.

That makes sense. It’s become a meme when a tech company goes public in the last 18 months to dig into its S-1 filing to find out how much money it has promised to spend on AWS, Azure, and Google’s Cloud. Often the numbers are in the eight and nine figures. It’s a lot of cost.

So, now that the cloud is the de facto way forward for tech-focused companies, keeping spending in check has rising demand. Enter Apptio’s deal, and the Flexera-RightScale tie-up.

Consider this our entry for the month concerning IT.

Illustration: .