Following up their multi-cloud theme which has been central to Scality’s vision since the announcement of Zenko this summer, Scality unveils a tool that lets apps for Amazon S3 support Microsoft Azure Blob Storage without having to be modified.

Storage vendor Scality has announced the immediate availability of Scality Connect for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. Scality Connect lets any application that works with Amazon S3 support Microsoft Azure Blob Storage without having to be modified. The announcement was made at Microsoft Ignite 2017 today in Orlando, where Scality is present at Booth #327.

“Multi-cloud is a new emerging story, which is different from hybrid cloud,” said Wally MacDermid, VP of cloud business development at Scality. “People want to be able to use all the clouds easily, without having to modify or customize their applications for them.”

Scality Connect becomes the third element in the company’s portfolio. Their RING software makes up the large majority of their business. In June they announced Zenko, a multi-cloud data controller based on the Amazon S3 APIs, which is in open source today. It can use them all in a global namespace, facilitating easier movement between clouds and avoiding being locked into one.

Scality Connect for Azure Blob Storage is designed to make it easier to move from S3 to Azure.

“The problem is that the S3 API has become the industry default,” MacDermid said. “That’s not a problem for S3 developers. But it is a problem for other cloud service providers like Microsoft that don’t support the S3 API. Microsoft and its customers are locked out unless they rewrite architectures to support Azure Blob Storage. We created a translation layer that fits between an S3-compatible app and Azure Blob storage, so you can immediately start using Blob without modifications.”

Scality Connect for Azure Blob Storage automatically translates Amazon S3 API calls to Azure Blob Storage API calls. It stores data in Azure native format so customers can access that data with Azure cloud services such as   Azure Machine Learning or Microsoft Power BI toolsets. In contrast, competitor gateway products to not put the data in native format.

So why didn’t Microsoft just do this themselves, to make their customers’ lives easier?

“Microsoft won’t do it because they don’t want to support their main competitor’s API directly,” MacDermid said. “So they get partners like us to do this for them. We have had weekly meetings with the Microsoft team on this for the last two months.”

So why is Scality doing this?

“We have a long history with the S3 API in RING, but this supports our multi-cloud message we announced with Zenko,” MacDermid indicated. “It solves a Microsoft pain point. However, it could also drive some enterprise deals for us, as Scality Connect opportunities evolve into Zenko ones.”

Scality Connect for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is available now through the Azure Marketplace.