Druva bought CloudRanger to respond to customer requests to be able to better handle cloud workloads on AWS, and executed the integration quickly because both companies were cloud-native with identical vertical stacks.

Cloud data protection vendor Druva has announced that CloudRanger, which Druva acquired in early June, has been integrated – as Druva CloudRanger – into the Druva Cloud Platform. CloudRanger was a focused AWS backup specialist before its acquisition, and the integration of Druva CloudRanger significantly enhances Druva’s AWS capabilities, on their platform which itself is relatively new in the market.

Druva acquired CloudRanger because CloudRanger had a stronger product for the AWS space than Druva did at that point.

“It’s a matter of speed to market,” said Dave Packer, VP of partner and alliance marketing at Druva. “Acquiring CloudRanger got us to ‘Apollo 2.0’ in a very short time. We announced Apollo, our AWS solution, last summer, and we were focused originally just on EC2 instances.”

Packer said Druva also decided to look outside for additional technology to respond to customer requests to help them solve problems around cloud workloads on AWS.

“We went to our Customer Advisory Board very early in February, and found many were actively moving to cloud in a fashion that was more aggressive than even we thought,” he indicated. “They told us not to prioritize on HCI, because it was only a temporary band-aid for companies moving to the cloud, and a stage that some would leap over. The Board said that their main problem was coming from moving to cloud workloads – EC2, RDS, Glacier, Redshift and many others. The challenge was all of that work was driven by IT folks writing scripts. That’s not hard when you have a small number of workloads. However, it becomes infinitely complex when you have large numbers in huge organizations with disparate teams.

“That’s why we looked at CloudRanger,” Packer said. “We looked at a few companies, but they had a unique approach. They develop cloud-native, like us, and also used AWS APIs, which was different from other providers who ran software. They used native APIs to allow snapshots to be taken and managed so orchestration can happen.”

The speedy integration – seven weeks – was significant.

“That’s a great proof point how much agility running native cloud provides,” Packer said. “We all went through acquisitions which involved the old world, which involved different software stacks, API, and UX, where they spend the next two years figuring out how to make it all work. I’ve been through that multiple times in my career. Druva and CloudRanger both had an integrated vertical stack that’s identical. We had already worked out the UX layer in our thinking around Apollo, and we were very similar there. Our stated differentiator is that our core competency is cloud. It’s not just a technical thing, but involves the way we launch our business model too.”

CloudRanger is now operated as an independent organization as a part of Druva, and the name will remain for the AWS offering.

“It’s now Druva CloudRanger, instead of Druva Apollo,” Packer said.

“Customers will now see much broader AWS functionality, than before, but it’s more than that,” he stated. “CloudRanger also brought new capabilities for things like auto-discovery and tagging – things we hadn’t thought of yet – as well as support for resource optimization. This is all part of us pivoting from domain-specific infrastructure stacks to a services platform, where you think about data sources and the services you lay over them. Customers will be able to see the services, including CloudRanger, managed on the Druva Cloud Platform. The platform itself just GAd a few months ago. Customers are just getting a grasp of its capabilities. It’s a breath of fresh air because it eases management, provides better management of data sprawl, and is all on-demand services because it’s cloud native.”

The channel implications are pretty straightforward.

“CloudRanger was primarily direct before they were acquired, using the AWS marketplace as an alternative channel,” Packer said. They served similar sorts of customers as Druva, focusing on larger ones and key verticals like manufacturing, pharma, and life sciences. Druva originally began selling direct, and then built in a channel over time, which has been growing, but is still a minority of sales.

“The Druva business has more of a traditional channel, mixed with the AWS Marketplace and direct, with around 45 per cent of the business now being channel,” Packer stated.