PORTLAND — The cloud is getting hip.
And that means Cloudability is finding itself very much in fashion.
Founded in 2011, the Portland company initially grew slowly as it sought to help businesses manage the data they store in other companies’ large data centers — commonly known as the cloud.
Cloudability initially focused on helping startups and young tech companies track what they spent on cloud platforms. At the time, cloud services were more expensive and fragmented and large, and established businesses often continued to host their own data.
Now, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and others have helped standardize cloud computing, bringing down the cost and ease of outsourcing information management, drawing in a more diverse set of businesses, including large corporations.
“The big kids are just coming into the cloud. The cool kids, they’re already into it,” said Mat Ellis, Cloudability’s founder and chief executive.
Now, Cloudability offers more than just cost management, including tools to help companies make their cloud computing more productive and efficient, and to help manage the migration from clients’ own services into the cloud. The company draws on its work with longtime clients to help new ones confronting the same types of challenges.
Cloudability has raised $40 million in venture investment altogether, including a $24 million round last year. The company employed about 70 at that time. Earlier this fall, its workforce topped 100 for the first time, and Cloudability has several open positions.
Most of those employees work in Cloudability’s new Pearl District headquarters, in a storied building that once housed Ziba Design, and then later Urban Airship, Jama Software and Opal Labs. But Cloudability also has a substantial presence in Boulder, Colorado, and a growing office in Australia.
Now, Ellis said, the company’s challenge is to manage its own growth.
“Every time you solve a problem you’re rewarded with another problem,” he said.
But for Cloudability, those are good problems to have.
