Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced plans to acquire Cloud Cruiser, a seven-year-old startup that lets IT divisions measure cloud usage.

The deal, announced in a blog entry by Scott Weller, senior vice president of technical services support, would seem a natural fit for HPE's philosophy of a hybrid IT model that combines the use of public and private clouds and an enterprise's own data centers. Cloud Cruiser helps an enterprise keep track of how much usage each environment is getting.

In fact, HPE is already using the startup's tools to help provide a service called Flexible Capacity, which lets enterprises charge for usage of on-premises data center infrastructure. In other words, an enterprise can offer a pay-as-you-go model internally.

Cloud Cruiser's other customers include Accenture, KPN, and TD Bank. Its competitors include Cloudyn and Spotinst.

David Zabrowski, the startup's founder and CEO, is a 16-year veteran of the old Hewlett-Packard Co., where at one point he was general manager of the Enterprise Computer Organization. The acquisition would have him reporting to Weller.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Photo: Ian Sane on Flickr. CC2.0 license. Photo has been cropped.