Doyenz ShadowCloud brings virtualization and cloud services to the SMB

Doyenz is announcing a 3.0 version of its managed service platform, dubbed Doyenz ShadowCloud. As companies continue to go after the enterprise market with virtualization and cloud-based solutions, Doyenz has been focused on the SMB market, trying to make enterprise-grade IT an affordable reality for these organizations.

The new version supports both physical and virtual IT environments, and it now includes support for VMware vSphere 4 as well. I found the company’s hybrid cloud technology platform interesting, and it had been a while since I had the pleasure of speaking with their CEO, Ashutosh Tiwary. With a new version launching, it seemed like the right time to follow up and see where the company has been and where it is going.

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InfoWorld Virtualization Report: The last time we spoke was in February of this year, and you had just launched the Doyenz platform. Can you tell us what Doyenz has been up to and how things are going?

Ashutosh Tiwary: As you recall, Doyenz is a virtualization and cloud-based managed services company out of Seattle. Our focus is the SMB, with a mission to bring enterprise-class IT at lower cost to the SMB through the VAR/MSP channel. We’ve seen phenomenal traction to date across all fronts: partners, customers, a Series-A funding round, the team. Today we’re announcing Version 3.0 of our managed service platform and are re-introducing it as the Doyenz ShadowCloud.

InfoWorld: Sounds like a cool new name. Tell us more about it.

Tiwary: The Doyenz ShadowCloud leverages virtualization, automation, and cloud to provide our partners with a regularly updated replica or a shadow copy of their customer’s production environment in the cloud. It offers what we call “true” business continuity with active disaster recovery and failover in the cloud. Because an active image is stored in the cloud at all times, partners can failover and run their customer’s production servers in just minutes from the cloud. Or use the Doyenz Production-Ready Virtual Lab to perform server migrations, testing, and provisioning.

What’s really important here is that we are the first to bring the breadth of enterprise-grade IT capabilities in a cloud-based managed services platform to the SMB, and at SMB prices.

InfoWorld: Enterprise capabilities at an SMB price — a great message. So how does it work?

Tiwary: With a simple installation of a host agent, the server’s data and configurations are replicated to the secure Doyenz datacenter. Changes to the customer’s production servers are uploaded automatically to the cloud on regularly scheduled intervals. In the event of disruption to the production environment, the partner can failover and start their server on demand in the cloud in minutes. They can download a copy of their server running in the cloud to their production environment once it’s fixed. Once the image is in the cloud, the partner can start a copy of the VM in our production-ready virtual lab within a secure fenced network and use the VM for testing, migrations, upgrades, and provisioning new applications.

InfoWorld: So the platform has a new name and has reached a 3.0 version. What will we see supported in this new version?

Tiwary: We’re announcing support for both physical and virtualized environments with the introduction of a new physical host agent. We also now support vSphere 4 for the latest virtualized environments.

The combination of these benefits actually enables us to act as a real bridge to virtualization and the cloud for the SMB. We’ve developed a hybrid model that enables the SMB to stage and manage their IT in the cloud, but run production onsite.

InfoWorld: The message was enterprise IT being affordable for the SMB market. Can you talk to us about pricing?

Tiwary: On average, our service runs approximately $100 a server per month. This includes storage, failover days, and time in the virtual lab.

InfoWorld: And what about the benefits?

Tiwary: Well, the customer gets enterprise-grade IT at predictable affordable cost. They minimize risk to business and productivity and get a rapid, high ROI. They switch from capex vs. opex — thousands vs. hundreds of dollars — their time to ROI is reduce to hours and days from weeks and months. Moreover, it’s easy: no hardware, software, or license to buy or people to train.

Our MSPs are realizing tremendous benefits. It’s an easy SaaS subscription model that allows them to build a recurring repeatable revenue stream and grow their profits, but provide better service to their customers at a lower cost.

InfoWorld: What about competition? Isn’t it a crowed space? How do you differentiate yourself from the crowd?

Tiwary: I agree, there are a lot of players trying to do similar things. However, most of them are trying to do this for enterprise customers or offer a piece of the capability that we provide. We are not aware of direct competitors that offer the breadth of the solution that we have at the affordable SMB price point that we offer.

I would like to thank Ashutosh Tiwary, CEO of Doyenz, for taking time out to speak with me. We’ll see how well the SMB market takes to cloud computing and if Doyenz and ShadowCloud can help with its platform and price point.