Disaster-recovery-as-a-service vendor Axcient Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., has introduced a new cloud-based infrastructure solution named Fusion that’s designed to help businesses consolidate and compress non-production workloads.
Those include disaster recovery but extend to backup, archiving, testing, and development, among others, as well. Many companies, especially in the mid-market and above, maintain separate, largely identical, resources for each of those functions.
“People create siloes of information that are replications of that production infrastructure,” says Axcient CEO Justin Moore. Collectively, he adds, those parallel environments consume roughly 70 percent of annual global IT outlays, yet sit idle for long stretches of time.
“That is a huge, inefficient waste,” Moore says.
Fusion’s objective is to eliminate that waste by rolling all of an organization’s non-production workloads together into one.
“We’re storing one de-duplicated copy of data on our infrastructure as opposed to six or seven siloes of it,” Moore says. “Most customers are going to see about a 30x reduction in footprint.”
Together with the lower administrative spending companies get from using cloud-based rather than in-house hardware, Moore continues, that infrastructure shrinkage can lower non-production IT costs by over 80 percent.
Pricing for Fusion begins at $79 per month per virtual machine. According to Moore, that’s substantially less than the $200 to $300 starting rates charged by larger vendors for DRaaS services, and a price point low enough to put Fusion within range of SMB technology budgets.
“We’re a big fan of the small business market,” he says.
For small business partners, Axcient contends, Fusion offers a way to support companies in the 200 to 1,000 employee range cost-effectively.
“It really empowers the service provider partners to go upmarket,” Moore says. It also delivers healthy profits, he adds.
“When our partners look at our portfolio, we are one of the higher dollar margin contributors,” Moore says. “We expect to be the same with Fusion.” Axcient currently has about 700 actively engaged partners, as well as over 5,000 end user customers.
Fusion runs on a freshly-created platform that combines pieces of the company’s legacy DRaaS infrastructure with large volumes of entirely new code and hardware. Hosted completely in the cloud, the system supplements resources housed in Axcient’s own data centers with additional capacity from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google’s Cloud Platform. Designing and deploying the solution took a team of up to 50 engineers close to 300,000 development hours over three years, and resulted in 23 patents.
“We were trying to extend our platform to really think bigger and disrupt ourselves,” Moore says. “It’s been a huge effort.”
It’s not over yet, either. Axcient plans to add data warehousing and analytics functionality to Fusion next year. According to Moore, users of that component will have the flexibility to choose from among several different analytics platforms.
“You can expect to have some Axcient options around that and you can expect some bring-your-own options around that,” he says.
