VMware is developing a multicloud management tool that Joe Kinsella, chief technology officer of CloudHealth at VMware, describes as “Google docs for IT management, which is the ability to collaborate and share across an organization.”

The company is making a “major investment” in this technology around “pioneering a really new way to do cloud management,” Kinsella continued. “It’s something we have in the hands of early customers today and we’re pretty excited about it. You’ll see in the second half of the year. It’s certainly something we think is a big game changer in the market.”

CloudHealth, which Kinsella founded in 2012, developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) multicloud management platform that works across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware vSphere-based clouds. VMware acquired CloudHealth last year. At the time, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said it gives VMware “the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry.”

The company quickly began integrating CloudHealth’s management tools with its technology like its vRealize management suite and Wavefront, its cloud analytics and monitoring platform. And in March, CloudHealth added a multicloud reporting feature that provides visibility across the aforementioned clouds, plus Kubernetes cluster visibility, from a single report.

VMware has also acquired a couple of Kubernetes-focused startups, Bitnami and Heptio, along the way as it moves to multicloud. And in addition to its No. 1 cloud partner AWS, it’s more recently announced hybrid cloud partnerships with Microsoft and Google.

So there’s a lot of moving parts to VMware’s multicloud strategy, from on-premises private clouds, to public clouds, and cloud-native services. The vendor says it’s committed to making all of this really easy for customers to manage — and that’s where CloudHealth comes in, and plays a starring role.

Earlier today VMware hosted a streaming cloud briefing during which Gelsinger succinctly described the company’s quest to be “the ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform from data center to cloud to edge.”

SDxCentral caught up with Kinsella in advance of the cloud briefing to discuss VMware’s multicloud strategy, and he said the highly decentralized nature of cloud management today means that management tools need to change as well.

“Management is often occurring far away from central IT as opposed to driven by central IT,” he said. “This decentralized model is allowing fast movement in the cloud, but to do it well with best practices, making sure you’re secure, you’re cost efficient, and overall being a good custodian of the resources you’re provisioning, you have to really have a new approach to management.”

Kinsella declined to go into detail about what this new cloud management tool under development will look like. But one example, he said, is that it will allow businesses to collaborate on things like budgeting across various departments and teams.

“A product that allows you to look at what you are running, forecast into the future, and define in all of those different places where you need to make budget decisions,” he said. “And then roll it up so that you get a seamless, cohesive, integrated budget that is worked on across the hierarchy. This, to us, is how management will look like in the future, which is that all features of management will move from centralized to distributed, and it’s something we want to make seamless and easy.”

Of course, this also requires automation, and to that end VMware is “investing in all things automated,” Kinsella said. “Our customers are moving toward a set-it-and-forget-it model.” In addition to providing analytics and recommendations to help make better business decisions, customers want CloudHealth to be able to optimize their cloud infrastructure for them, and make policy-based moves around cloud performance, rightsizing, and cost.

“So really having closed-loop optimization in all places from containers, to reservations, to the use of cloud storage,” he explained.