Arcserve also says out a roadmap to have, within twelve months, a midmarket disaster recovery offering based on a fusion of the two technologies that overcomes today’s pricing, complexity and efficiency issues.
Availability vendor Arcserve has announced the completion of the acquisition of Zetta, an established vendor in the availability space whose technological differentiation has been its simple direct-to-cloud capabilities. That was a capability Arcserve did not have previously. The Zetta brand is disappearing, and the Zetta technology will be integrated directedly into Arcserve’s UDP solution. Zetta customers who just wanted the direct-to-cloud capability will, however be able to get that, as it will be a module on the UDP platform.
“We are taking great technology and rolling it into our UDP solution,” said Rick Parker, Arcserve’s CMO. “We did not have the capability before to back up directly into the cloud without using additional hardware. Integrating Zetta technology into Arcserve UDP expands our capabilities for direct-to-cloud.”
Zetta, founded in 2009, has always had good technology. Their go-to-market strategy has always been curious however. First, they sold mainly direct, in a market where most players – like Arcserve – sell entirely or almost entirely through the channel. More recently Zetta added an MSP channel, but that was a small portion of their business. That would have been an arguable strategy if their focus had been on very large customers – but it wasn’t. Their core market is SMEs – companies larger than SMBs who typically have at least one full time IT person.
The other unusual thing about Zetta’s go-to-market capability is that their data centres were only in the U.S. With data sovereignty having become considerably more important than at the time Zetta was founded, and since they were purely a cloud offering, that largely limited their market to the U.S.
Arcserve will be able to address both these issues within a fairly short time frame, significantly expanding the technology’s reach.
“Arcserve has a very large global distribution channel, which will allow us to roll the Zetta technology out worldwide,” Parker said. “While we acquired Zetta on June 14 and are announcing it today, it will take a while to get it ready for our channel. It will be available in the U.S. to be sold as of August 14th.
Outside the U.S., the lack of the data centres for Zetta mean it will take longer in some markets, although in others, like Latin America, and the rest of Asia Pacific, data sovereignty is much less of an issue. Arcserve does have a plan in place to get the solution into those markets where it is, however.
“The next place we are moving to is to EMEA, and that is scheduled for the fall,” Parker said. “We are negotiating that right now. Japan is a top priority for us, because we have 54 per cent market share there, and that’s next, in the spring. Canada would be a target immediately following that.”
The Zetta brand is being retired and the Zetta offering is being rebranded as Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, with two modules, for DRaaS and BaaS. The direct-to-cloud capability provides an extremely simple offering which is expected to appeal to organizations with many distributed remote offices, or retailers with many chain stores.
“This will allow our partners to provide strong support for distributed offices that they really couldn’t before,” said Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing.
Parker also laid out Arcserve’s roadmap to integrate the two technologies in the longer term to turn DRaaS into true disaster avoidance for the midmarket – something he said no company really provides today.
“Disaster avoidance can be defined as the ability to avoid any disaster by being able to recover in seconds,” he said. “We have a disaster avoidance roadmap to go beyond DRaaS that combines these two technologies to create availability for the mid-market that’s a game changer.”
Parker said true disaster avoidance requires that five criteria be met. First, it has to be out-of-the-box simple.
“You can’t ask the mid-market to assemble a tech kit,” he said.
Secondly, it has to be supported through a self-service portal, because mid-market companies can’t afford a service bureau. The third stipulation is near-zero data loss, meaning that no more than a minute of data is lost. Fourth is comprehensive support of all mid-market platforms, hypervisors, cloud and on prem. Finally, it all has to be affordable, at a mid-market price point.”
“No one including us meets this criteria today,” Parker said. “The solutions are too expensive. Assembly is required for things like HA/replication. Self-service DRaaS offerings available today also lack an advanced application engine, and lose hours of data.”
The plan, Parker indicated, is within the next twelve months, to combine Arcserve’s technologies, including their advanced replication engine, with Zetta’s networking IP, self service portal and data centres optimized for DRaaS, to turn all this into an offering.
“This is a new roadmap for true midmarket disaster avoidance,” Bertrand said.
