The features of the next-gen Pivot3 Acuity platform introduced last year are being migrated to the cloud, beginning with using its dynamic provisioning capability for backup and disaster recovery.

Hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor Pivot3 has announced the availability of the Pivot3 Cloud Edition on Amazon Web Services [AWS], the first extension of their software platform to the public cloud. The first application available will be backup and disaster recovery.

“Pivot3 is a small company competing at the higher end of the market with the likes of Dell EMC, HPE and Cisco,” said Bruce Milne, Pivot3’s CMO. “We are able to do this because of innovation. In the last year, we rolled out the next version of our platform, which is multi tenanted, incorporated NVMe, and includes dynamic provisioning. This now takes that same capability and moves it into the cloud.”

Pivot3 Cloud Edition features an Intelligent Cloud Engine which offers policy-based management capabilities that automate data placement and data protection tasks between on-prem and the public cloud. It contains the same code base as Pivot3’s next-gen Acuity HCI offering, that was released last year. The Acuity features are being migrated to the cloud, starting with using the dynamic provisioning for backup and disaster recovery. Its intelligent orchestration manages replication jobs based on service level priorities and simple data protection policies.

“This initial application uses the cloud as a backup target, with the Cloud Engine determining the best place to put the data,” Milne said. “It will be followed by a whole series of releases, as we think that the market will be ready to consume them.”

Milne said this offering is aimed mainly at larger companies who use the public cloud, but are unhappy about its cost

“About 60 of our revenue is coming from the Fortune 1000,” he indicated. “They typically use between four and six public cloud products – while complaining the most about the cost of moving to the public cloud. They are looking for this kind of capability for managing the cloud. Anyone who deploys at scale will benefit from this.”

The decision to start first with AWS came from customer feedback.

“A lot of our road map decisions relating to the Cloud comes from discussions with customers, and a user group we started last year, Milne said. “AWS came back as the number one request from customers, although we have seen a lot of interest in Azure as well.”

The plan is to expand to other clouds, but nothing has been decided about when.

“We don’t have timing specifics, but we do want the most comprehensive array of cloud products we can possibly have,” Milne indicated. “We are looking for guidance from MSP partners about what they want here. Our MSP partners who resell and host us will really value this, because mission-critical applications can be differentiated with dynamic provisioning. It will let them allow customers to start embracing the cloud right away in an automated fashion.”

Milne expects that some of their customers who are in pipeline now will consider the cloud option.

“I expect that a surprising number of them will be interested in this,” he said. “It’s why we set backup and disaster recovery as our first deployment. It will set the precedent for deploying more, like application portability.”

Milne said that they expect Pivot3 Cloud Edition on Amazon Web Services will be a major triumph for the company.

“It demonstrates that we are continuing to deliver on our heritage of innovation,” he said. “It will allow large and small customers to take the simplicity of HCI and scale it to the cloud, and automate. That’s an  enormous step forward for anyone in HCI in the first place.”