Apptio is acquiring cost management platform provider Cloudability in a move to expand its reach into the multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Cloudability’s Financial Operations Platform leverages data science, machine learning (ML), and automation to sort through cloud spending programs. This allows customers to have a simplified view of their usage and spending across different cloud platforms. The platform can also interpret usage from virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless workloads.

It works across multicloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and is used to manage more than $9 billion in enterprise cloud spending.

Apptio co-founder and CEO Sunny Gupta explained that the acquisition will allow it to focus on deeper reserved instance planning; predictive forecasting; optimizing workflow integration to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools like Jira and Slack; and better management planning using monitoring tools like DataDog.

Cloudability last year integrated its cloud cost management platform with DataDog’s monitoring and analytics platform. It also struck a deal with Mode2 to use serverless architecture to help companies better manage spending on public cloud deployments. That deal has Mode2 using Cloudability’s cost usage recommendations to analyze enterprise cloud and legacy spending. Mode2 will then create a business case for redeveloping applications and workloads that use serverless to lower development and operational costs.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released, but the deal is expected to close by mid-year. “It’s our goal to integrate the two platforms as quickly as possible,” Gupta said. “Right now, we expect a high-level integration to be completed three to four months post close.”

Gupta added that Apptio will “still continue to sell both applications as we offer customers deep public cloud optimization as well as differentiated features like advanced modeling, chargeback, and app [total cost of ownership].”

Apptio is quite familiar with the merger and acquisition space. It acquired ML-based cloud optimization software provider FittedCloud last October. The Cloudability deal also comes four months after Apptio was gobbled up by venture capital firm Vista Equity Partners for $1.94 billion.

The cloud cost management space is seeing increased attention as organizations are growing their use of multicloud environments. A recent Gartner report predicts that 75% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model by 2020.

VMware recently updated its vRealize platform with the ability to plan for “what-if” scenarios like comparing capacity and costs of moving workloads across different clouds. This feature works across VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds.

Others in the space include Red Hat, Cisco, and Flexera's RightScale.