Our guest on the podcast this week is Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder at CloudHealth.

We discuss the founding story of CloudHealth, testing ideas to find the right problem to solve. We look at how Joe took the company from idea through finding early customers and fundraising. Joe made sure early on not to get attached to ideas, but to define key hypotheses and converge to the real opportunities through testing. As he became more confident in what he was building, he began to write more of the code for it. We look at why successful entrepreneurs need to be willing to embrace contrary opinions.

CloudHealth does cloud service management. They deliver a SaaS-based single pane of glass, single pane of governance for managing the full life-cycle of applications and infrastructure across public and private clouds. They currently have four products: Amazon, Azure, Google, and a Data Center product. Each provides integrated reporting, recommendations, and active policy management. The policy management does not just monitor changes that deviate from your internal policies, but drives active changes to your environments to keep them in compliance. It works like a control plane that sits on top of everything you use to manage different environments.

A typical management suite in the cloud consists of 10-12 different tools as well as multiple different cloud environments. CloudHealth allows you to configure them all in the platform, they collect all the information that resides in those different integrations of cloud environments, and bring it back into one console in terms of what the data means and how it interacts. CloudHealth then provides integrated reporting, integrated recommendations, and active policy recommendations. With a click of a button, you can determine what it would take to integrate different tools and what provisioning the integration requires. This makes managing the cloud much more streamlined and cost-efficient.