It would seem that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google want to own the cloud. Most of the big tech companies have invested millions into building out technologies and data centers for commercial cloud services. Microsoft's Azure platform has made great strides to compete with Amazon and Google. To that end, Microsoft has announced that they are acquiring Cloudyn, an Israeli startup that helps customers manage billing across multiple clouds.

A cloud billing and management platform will help Microsoft compete more closely with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. This is also particularly helpful to companies who are pursuing multi-cloud strategies. Per Microsoft's Jeremy Winter, "Cloudyn gives enterprise customers tools to identify, measure and analyze consumption, enable accountability and forecast future cloud spending."

It also helps that Cloudyn was already a Microsoft partner. Back in March, Cloudyn announced support for Microsoft Cloud Solutions Providers, companies who sit between the cloud provider (Azure, AWS, etc.) and businesses and provide monitoring services on behalf of those business clients. Cloudyn's multi-cloud management and billing solutions would uniquely qualified to fulfill that need.

Cloudyn also boasts thousands of clients including several Fortune 500 companies. According to Winter, "Since working with Cloudyn, one U.S.-based Fortune 500 customer has seen a 286 percent return on investment (ROI) with regard to their cloud efficiencies, demonstrating Cloudyn's ability to help customers accelerate their cloud adoption. Cloudyn capabilities will be incorporated into our product portfolio that offers customers the industry's broadest set of cloud management, security and governance solutions."

The deal, which has been estimated around $50 million to 70 million according to TechCrunch, should be a definite advantage to Microsoft. While Cloudyn works with a variety of cloud services including AWS, Docker, and OpenStack, businesses who utilize Azure will certainly get better integration with Microsoft services.