AWS' CloudEndure Buy Boosts Migration Chops

Amazon Web Services is bulking up its cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery services with this week’s acquisition of CloudEndure, a six-year-old startup that not only has been a partner of the cloud giant since 2016, but also works with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and VMware.

The deal, reportedly in the range of $200-$250 million, had been rumored for several days, but the small Israeli company backed by Dell Technologies and others ultimately posted on its website that it is “now an Amazon Web Services company.”

CloudEndure’s IT Resilience Suite for the Hybrid Cloud enables enterprises to more easily and safely migrate workloads and data into and across multiple cloud platforms. The suite also includes Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud as technology partners — and the products work with OpenStack environments. As businesses move their Windows or Linux applications into the public cloud – or from one cloud to another – the CloudEndure products ensure there is no disruption or downtime.

Bringing such capabilities into the fold will be a boon for AWS as enterprises increasingly move more of their workloads into the cloud and adopt hybrid-cloud strategies.

IDC’s Deepak Mohan

“CloudEndure’s big value proposition has been their low/no downtime migration into public cloud, making it easy for enterprises to start adopting public cloud in a backup and failover manner,” IDC analyst Deepak Mohan told Channel Partners. “That’s a great native asset for AWS to have [in its] portfolio, and the acquisition makes perfect sense from their perspective. A large portion of cloud adoption is driven by enterprises moving existing applications into public cloud.”

Mohan said the potential for deeper integration with the AWS ecosystem “will continue to reduce barriers to AWS adoption for these customers and applications. The acquisition would also give AWS insights into customers that have been using CloudEndure to go to other providers — and understand how they could improve competitiveness.”

Though public clouds have been around for years, the bulk of enterprise workloads continue to run on premises. The industry is moving past the early-adopter phase and into what Paul Teich, principal analyst with Liftr Cloud Insights, calls the “early majority phase” of adoption. Most companies will adopt a multicloud strategy, spreading their workloads among two or more public clouds rather than putting everything in one.

“Cloud started to go mainstream in the 2014-2016 period and we tagged 2017 as the year when cloud became the new normal. In 2018 cloud started to dominate IT spending in some areas, sucking up potential growth opportunities for non-cloud technologies and services,” wrote John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a report on the rapid growth of the cloud market.

CloudEndure has struck up working relationships with most of the top cloud players, of which AWS – with 34 percent of the market, according to Synergy – is the largest, followed by Azure, Google, Alibaba, IBM and Salesforce. Whether the partnerships with other cloud providers continue now that CloudEndure is part of AWS is unclear. AWS has a strong working relationship with VMware, so continued support from CloudEndure will likely continue, but the story might not be the same for …

… other cloud providers.

Google in May 2018 made its own move in the cloud-migration space, scooping up startup Velostrata to make it easier for organizations to move workloads and data from their on-premises environments into the public cloud, and to do so at their own pace. IDC’s Mohan said whether CloudEndure continues to support Azure, Google and other cloud providers will depend on the level of integration between the company and AWS.

“Given the competition in this market, it’s understandable that other providers may not want to work with an AWS-owned entity on their critical customer on-boarding,” he said, adding that doing so would give AWS visibility into new customer on-boarding with its competitors. “If the integration with AWS is strong and un-firewalled, I’d expect the other providers’ reliance on CloudEndure to cool off over time, making the other providers work with other migration/on-boarding partners and invest in their internal assets for such functionality. If CloudEndure continues to operate as an independent company, these may not be major concerns.”

CloudEndure over the past several years has raised more than $18 million from not only Dell but also VMware and other investors such as Mitsui, Infosys and Magma Venture Partners. The company also has an active partner program with 20 resellers and service delivery channels, including Rackspace, Tata, LogicWorks, Cloud Technology Partners and Infosys.