Adding Convirture’s day to day operations management capability to Accelerite’s disaster recovery focus provides a single pane of glass with a consolidated view of the management of the multiple clouds and internal virtualization technologies in modern hybrid data centres.
Eric Webster, Accelerite’s Chief Revenue Officer
Arsalan Farooq, Convirture’s CEO, and Accelerite’s new VP of Products
Santa Clara-based Accelerite, which makes management software for IT infrastructure, mobile, and cloud solutions, has announced the acquisition of Convirture, a startup which also makes management software for virtualized and cloud environments. Their areas of focus are different, however, and very complementary. Convirture was just starting its channel, and its solution will strengthen the hand of Accelerite’s large partner community, by giving them a much fuller, end-to-end offering. In addition, Arsalan Farooq, Convirture’s CEO, will join Accelerite as VP of Products, focusing mainly on their cloud strategy.
Accelerite is a subsidiary of Persistent Systems, an Indian tech giant, and was spun out last year. They have a range of offerings, including disaster recovery for both on-prem and cloud environments, and cloud migration services. Rovius is their multi-cloud workload management and disaster recovery orchestration software solution.
“The Convirture products fit perfectly in the Accelerite portfolio,” said Eric Webster, Accelerite’s Chief Revenue Officer.
Farooq, the former Convirture CEO, also emphasized that the fit between the two solution sets were ideal.
“Accelerite didn’t address what Convirture did previously,” he said. “What they did was handle a couple key verticals – disaster recovery and business continuity workload management. We were doing broad orchestration, with unified management platform capabilities. Where there was complete overlap, however, was our target customers and the set of problems we were looking to solve.”
This emerging hybrid data centre problem revolves around the issue of platform proliferation.
“If you walk in to any data centre today, you will find multiple platforms, such as VMware, HyperV, Linux, KVM, Xen, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and OpenStack,” Farooq said. “All of these are used to solve a pain point. But the proliferation of platforms and no way to manage them effectively for user access and diagnostics if things break can be incredibly complex. The pain has moved from ‘how do you virtualize’ to herding cats.”
Convirture proves a single pane of glass to provide a consolidated view of the day to day operations of operations management for all these platforms.
“Accelerite was servicing exactly the same problem created by different clouds and internal virtualization technologies for disaster recovery to prevent fragmented solutions,” Farooq noted. “Adding Convirture was a match made in heaven because it provides joint handling of disaster recovery and day to day operations.”
Accelerite is a channel-first company, with a large ecosystem of over 500 VAR and MSP partners worldwide, and for this network, the impact of the Convirture acquisition should be massive.
“Convirture was a much smaller company, and was in the very early stages of our channel development, with a few key partners, but we were highly committed to it,” Farooq said. “Our mix was still heavily in favor of direct but we were changing rapidly to channel. Moving into this healthy channel ecosystem selling into accounts we would like sell into was a great fit for us.”
It’s also a great fit for that existing Accelerite channel, Farooq stressed.
“Now partners have the ability to offer a soup to nuts solution,” he said. “We believe that this channel impact will be fully tectonic in scale. Previously, Accelerite partners could sell only against the disaster recovery pain point, just as ours could only sell against the automation pain point.”
Farooq said the impact of this is far greater than simply having more products in their tool set.
“Having a more comprehensive solution will let the channel get opportunities they never could before,” he said.
Accelerite will make Convirture’s technology available both as a joint cloud solution comprised of Rovius and ConVirt, and as an independent ConVirt offering.
