ST Engineering bolsters cloud portfolio with CloudSphere investment

ST Engineering has beefed up its cloud services portfolio via an investment in CloudSphere, a US-based cloud management and governance vendor. Made through its venture capital arm ST Engineering Ventures, the investment will see the Singapore company expand its current cloud services beyond assessment and migration. 

The investment round was made alongside growth equity tech fund, Atlantic Bridge Capital, and would provide ST Engineering "direct access" to hybrid and multi-cloud management and government software and services, the Singapore company said in a statement Tuesday. It added that the investment was part of the organisation's efforts to drive its capabilities in professional and management services in public cloud. 

ST Engineering is a technology, defence, and engineering group focusing on the aerospace, electronics, land systems, and marine sectors. It VC arm invests in startups in high growth areas such as robotics, autonomous technology, and cybersecurity. 

Asked how much it invested in CloudSphere, an ST Engineering spokesperson declined to reveal the amount, but noted that this was its first investment in a cloud company. She told ZDNet that the company was keen to collaborate with startups, including "co-creating" products and services, that were in high growth areas including cloud and data analytics. 

Responding to questions on customer adoption and growth of cloud services over the past couple of years, the spokesperson said ST Engineering was seeing increased interests in its cloud infrastructure services from its government as well as private or commercial enterprise customers globally.

"Governments all over the world are increasingly adopting a cloud-first policy and establishing their procurement frameworks on government commercial clouds, while commercial businesses are increasingly modernising their applications and building cloud-native applications, leveraging cloud to scale their business, accelerate time to market, and to enhance digital business resilience with identity, security, governance, and management," she added.

Elaborating on ST Engineering's collaboration with CloudSphere, she said it would "enrich" the former's cloud services portfolio for government and commercial public clouds as well as its packaged IP offerings for private, public, and hybrid cloud operations. 

The partnership also would provide a technology stack that provided visibility on costs, identity and security, and management of cloud deployments with automation and data insights, she added.

"Our customers face varied challenges such as comprehensive visibility and control across their cloud assets, data classification and residency, security standards and policy, application and data platform modernisation, transition and transformation, financial, and operations governance," she noted. 

ST Engineering's president of electronics sector Ravinder Singh noted in the statement that enterprises operating in hybrid and multi-cloud environments were using many different sets of tools, including in resource provisioning and monitoring, cost reporting, and security, as well as identity dashboards with multiple, disparate control planes. 

ST Engineering's investment in CloudSphere would afford its customers "greater visibility and control" of their multi-cloud inventory, performance, and costs, Singh said. This expansion of its managed services portfolio would enable ST Engineering to tap opportunities with cloud technology, he added.

Amongst CloudSphere's offerings is its flagship cloud governance platform, which allows customers to manage public cloud deployments with automation tools. 

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