HyAlto, formerly known as AirVM, has retooled its business model to simplify and more effectively monetize cloud services management for MSPs, and has announced support for the Veeam cloud as they build out their ecosystem.

MIAMI – HyAlto, which is not a new company, but which has a new name and a new MSP-centric business model, has announced the availability of Veeam support following their recent joining of the Veeam Alliance Partner program. The company believes that it has a differentiated value proposition for MSPs, and has been at the VeeamON event here this week, looking to expand their partner base.

HyAlto, formerly known as AirVM, is one of the companies in the Wesley Clover stable, the Ottawa-based Terry Matthews company that focuses on incubating early stage start-ups. The company that became HyAlto actually started out as an IaaS provider in 2008, selling direct, exclusively with VMware technology, and with data centres in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Since then, however, they have pivoted the company – three times.

“The first pivot came five years ago, when we built a cloud portal and became a cloud platform,” said Alan Zurakowski, HyAlto’s CEO. “With the portal, over time we had other VMware CSPs wanting to license us, so we had two lines of business, the direct IaaS business and a cloud software business with the cloud monetization portal.”

The second pivot came in 2016.

“We sold the IaaS business to TeraGo, and focused on the MSP as the target market,” Zurakowski indicated.

The third pivot came late last year, and involved the rebranding of the company.

“Our original platform was built solely built for VMware, and we determined that we needed to support public clouds, so we rebuilt the platform and launched our Alto multi-cloud architecture.” Zurakowski said. “The HyAlto rebrand happened at that time. The Veeam cloud is now the second one which we support.” They don’t yet support any of the big hyperscale public clouds, but that is the plan as they broaden out further.

The HyAlto business model today focuses on what they term multi-cloud monetization. They simplify cloud services management for MSPs by removing the complexities related to cloud services front-office quoting, ordering, back-office billing and chargebacks, through a single pane of glass interface to monetize Veeam and VMware services.

“There are 5000 MSPs who resell VMware as a private hosted service, and we are an enabler for them,” Zurakwoski said. “There are tools to do these things in the public cloud, but it is a gap in VMware’s product, and it’s something that most MSPs do with manual processes. We replace those. We focus on the order entry workflow, dealing with pain points in scaling and on the back end.”

It’s a market which is not oversaturated – in the MSP space.

“There are dozens of cloud management platforms, but all but two are focused on the enterprise, and the enterprise platforms don’t have the multi-tenanted platform that MSPs need,” Zurakowski indicated. “There are really only two companies, us and OnApp, a competitor based in the U.K, who are specifically focused on the MSP market.”

While HyAlto does have a few enterprise customers, about 95 per cent are MSPs.

“I want to own this MSP market,” Zurakowski said. “That’s the focus.”

Their MSP base ranges from the very small to the fairly large, although the biggest aren’t really a market for this.

“Very large MSPs have their own development shops,” Zurakowski indicated.

At this stage, the MSP base is fairly small, but it’s still early days.

“We have a few dozen MSPs at this point, but we have really only been in the market with this for the last six months,” Zurakowski said.

Trade shows like VeeamOn are essential to broaden that base, but Zurakowski acknowledged that they are tricky for a company like themselves.

“HyAlto isn’t a known brand,” he said. “We are a brand new vendor. So when the doors open up on the first day, we don’t blow the roof off because the MSPs don’t know who we are. Day two was much better, when we had some good conversations.”

Zurakowski said that the show also had value for them in exposing them to at least one other vendor, also fairly new in the market, who would be a logical company for them to partner with. The plan is to continue reaching out to MSP partners, including appearing at the shows for RMM/PSA vendors, where MSPs tend to congregate.

“We don’t yet have any relationships with those vendors, but we do plan to develop them,” Zurakowski said.