Arcserve brings the technology adapted from last year’s acquisition of Zetta to market, with the ability to deliver the go-to-market potential that always eluded Zetta.

Today, data protection vendor Arcserve is unveiling Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, its direct-to-cloud disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS) solution, which uses technology from last year’s acquisition of Zetta integrated into Arcserve’s own technology. Arcserve is optimistic that the offerings extremely low cloud recovery points will see it do well among mid-market customers looking for enterprise grade availability.

“We are seeing increasing trends in the midmarket towards leveraging cloud as-a-service, or moving backup workloads to the cloud,” said Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing. “With the technology we acquired from Zetta, we realized that we had an opportunity to change the game. There is no hardware on site, unlike competitor products which require an appliance, and it is all direct to cloud.”

Bertrand stressed that this big breakthrough here – what makes the offering much more than simply a rebranding of Zetta – is the advances in recovery point objective times [RPOs], which have been over an hour in the past.

“The recovery point objectives that used to be acceptable are just not acceptable any more,” he said. “With this we offer 15 minute cloud RPOs for near-zero data loss, as well as five minute failover of the whole IT environment. We think that’s the big news here.”

When Arcserve acquired Zetta, they stated that the objective was to be able to achieve this integration in a year.

“We were really able to accelerate our roadmap,” Bertrand said. “We did this in only five months.”

While this initial iteration of Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct integrates the back end and agent-side technologies, and improves the RPOs, customers and partners can expect more enhancements to the technology.

“Looking ahead, we will be focusing on interface elements,” said Erica Antony, VP of Product Management at Arcserve. “We are working on a new cloud console, along with third party experts on UI design, to make sure we are optimizing task flows. The goal is to make it intuitive and simple for IT generalists.”

Coming after that is a broader unification of the cloud experience. This will include broader suite integration with common naming, look, feel and licensing. It will include simplified deployment with a single log-in, push-button simplicity and making it easier for users to help themselves with self-serve functionality.

“All these things will be in the cloud console that is coming,” Antony said. “This unification of cloud solutions will bundle in things that enable management by exception. We have a very aggressive roadmap that extends beyond this year, but the cloud console and user experience are just around the corner.”

Arcserve’s broad strength in the channel is a key reason why they expect that Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct will have much more market impact than the original Zetta solution. Zetta sold primarily direct for years – with a midmarket product – and while they eventually did develop a channel, it was a fraction the size of Arcserve’s. Arcserve also has much greater strength in international markets than Zetta, whose offering was primarily limited to the U.S.

“We have optimized this for partners – including cloud service providers and MSPs,” Antony said. “We are  seeing a lot of partners transforming – like us – from a traditional on-prem business. We designed the product to be attractive for the partner community, with subscription-based pricing that is highly competitive in the market, and with cloud-first incentives.”

Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct will not require partner certification, or even much training, because it is comparatively simple.

“Because this is web-based and born in the cloud, it is easy for partners to learn,” Bertrand said. “If you can use a browser, you can use this. This makes it ideal for partners, because it reduces time needed for training. The partner portal will have training for this, so partners can see how its deployed, but it is very easy to consume.”

The solution is also well suited for the MSP space.

“It is highly customizable and fully multi-tenanted,” Bertrand indicated. “MSP partners can also rebrand it as part of their stack.”