Accelerite Bets Big On Hybrid Cloud Management

The line between IT vendor and solution provider appears to be getting blurrier as solution providers cast about for way higher margin opportunities.

This week Accelerite, the product division of Persistent Systems, a global provider of IT services, acquired Convirture, a provider of virtual machine and cloud management software.

Accelerite CEO Nara Rajagopalan says Convirture complements Accelerite’s existing data protection products by enabling the company to bring to market a more complete portfolio of cloud computing products. Specifically, the Accelerite Rovius multi-cloud workload management and disaster recovery orchestration software will be tightly coupled to the ConVirt unified management platform. That approach will make it easier for Accelerite to engage enterprise customers that want to limit the number of cloud management vendors they need to engage, said Rajagopalan.

ConVirt, which will also continue to be available as standalone software, unifies the management of VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, Amazon Web Services, and OpenStack under a common management console. Arsalan Farooq, formerly CEO of Convirture who will now serve as vice president of products for Accelerite, says the major opportunity for Accelerite going forward will be around emerging heterogeneous cloud computing environments that span multiple types of virtual machines and public cloud computing platforms. As noted by the market research firm IDC, 67 percent of enterprises expect to employ two or more major cloud service providers this year.

The big challenge, of course, is that while most organizations have deployed multiple types of clouds, the vast majority of them are managed in a semi-autonomous manner. IT organizations that have deployed VMware, for example, tend to prefer VMware management tools, while OpenStack proponents clearly tend to favor open source software.

Farooq said the cost of managing all those clouds independently will eventually force IT organizations to move towards a unified cloud management framework. The question is to what degree IT services providers will be among the first to force that issue. Managed service providers (MSPs) in particular have a vested interest in tools that enable to manage multiple cloud environments spanning multiple customers. Otherwise, the cost of delivering those services for each platform the MSP supports wind up being prohibitively expensive, or they have to build their own platform from the ground up.

In the meantime, solution providers clearly see the rise of heterogeneous hybrid clouds as major opportunity to deliver high value services; assuming, of course, they have to patience to wait for demand for those services to actually manifest themselves.