CloudCheckr to be acquired by Fortune 500 firm

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Rochester-based CloudCheckr has signed an agreement to be acquired by NetApp, a Fortune 500 company with headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Started in 2011, CloudCheckr is a cloud optimization platform that helps clients to lower costs, maintain security and compliance, and optimize cloud resources. The firm partners with large public cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

In a blog post, CloudCheckr CEO Tim McKinnon wrote that his firm and NetApp have “a shared vision and common beliefs around solving the challenges of managing public cloud for companies, managed service providers and resellers alike.” He added that Spot by NetApp, which NetApp acquired last year, “has an extensive portfolio of products that are uniquely complemented by CloudCheckr, particularly for organizations with complex cloud environments and those that manage, sell and run cloud for others.”

For CloudCheckr, he wrote, “this isn’t the end, but rather the beginning of a new phase of rapid growth and innovation for all of our employees, our products and most importantly, our customers and partners.”

McKinnon has led CloudCheckr since joining the firm in 2019. It was founded by Aaron Klein, who served as chief operating officer until December 2017, and former CEO Aaron Newman, who now is executive chairman.

CloudCheckr says it has more than 10,000 users and a workforce that tops 200.

To fuel its growth, CloudCheckr secured at least $65 million in funding in the last five years. In March 2017, CloudCheckr announced it had raised $50 million in institutional funding from New York-based Level Equity. Then in August 2019, another financing round led by Level Equity raised $15 million.

In 2020, plans to expand CloudCheckr’s headquarters in downtown Rochester were announced. The expansion was expected to cost $6.7 million. In making the announcement as part of his State of the State agenda, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Empire State Development would provide CloudCheckr with up to $8 million in assistance through the Excelsior Jobs Tax Credit Program in exchange for committing to the creation of 397 jobs. Monroe County and Greater Rochester Enterprise also assisted with the project. CloudCheckr expected to complete the expansion in the summer of 2025.

Founded in 1992, San Jose, Calif.-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) now has more than 10,000 employees worldwide and has earned a place on the Fortune 500 each year since 2012. On the most recent list, it ranked 497th.

In fiscal year 2021, the company earned $730 million on net revenues of$5.74 billion, compared to a profit of $819 million on revenues of $5.41 billion in the prior year.

“Managing costs while accelerating cloud applications is a significant challenge for organizations as they work to maximize the ROI of their cloud investments, all while running at cloud speed,” said Anthony Lye, executive vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Public Cloud Services business unit. “By adding cloud billing analytics, cost management capabilities, cloud compliance and security to our CloudOps platform through the acquisition of CloudCheckr, we are enabling organizations to deploy infrastructure and business applications faster while reducing their capital and operational costs.”

In a blog post, Lye noted that with 81 percent of organizations already running applications in the cloud, “the number one question for businesses now is not why, when, or even how, but how much.” CloudCheckr, he wrote, helps solve the key issue these businesses face: how to tighten the reins on their escalating cloud costs and maintain secure cloud configurations while speeding their move to and on public clouds.

“What (businesses) are telling us now is that they need help finding ways to cut cloud costs while accelerating their cloud adoption,” he wrote.

Paul Ericson is Rochester Beacon executive editor.

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