AWS Officially Acquires Dell-Backed CloudEndure

CloudEndure, an Israeli data migration technology specialist backed by Dell Technologies, confirmed Thursday it had been snagged by leading cloud juggernaut Amazon Web Services

Reports of nearly completed negotiations circulated earlier this week in Israeli media, where the purchase price has been pegged somewhere in the $200 to $250 million range.

The Israeli-American developer of advanced replication technology posted on its website: "this acquisition expands our ability to deliver innovative and flexible migration, backup, and disaster recovery solutions."

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CloudEndure offers a conversion engine that moves any workload running in a Windows or Linux environment, without interruption, to just about any target cloud.

As a company that migrates data to and between clouds, CloudEndure has struck relationships with the major hyper-scale players.

Even before it became an AWS Advanced Technology Partner in 2016, CloudEndure had a particularly close relationship with Google.

In 2015, in a unique form of partnership, Google began financing migrations to its cloud performed by CloudEndure.

Some media reports suggest Google was vying to acquire the startup.

Google, however, last year bought Velostrata, another Israeli startup developing unique migration capabilities.

CloudEndure is also a partner of Microsoft Azure and VMware, and it integrates with OpenStack environments. The product allows live workloads to be migrated with minimal operational disruption between those environments.

As to disaster recovery, it provides a near-zero recovery point objective and recovery time objective.

In 2015, Gonen Stein, CloudEndure's vice president of business development, told CRN that enterprises concerned about cloud lock-in were driving demand for the product.

AWS has been stressing the opportunity around cloud migration services to its channel partners for more than a year now, saying that these services are among the most in-demand among businesses today.

Many business are leaning toward a multi-cloud strategy, employing at least two cloud solutions within their environments to avoid vendor lock-in. Research firm Gartner predicts that multi-cloud will be the common strategy for 70 percent of enterprises in 2019.

CloudEndure has raised $20 million so far in funding. The firm is led by co- founder and CEO Ofer Gadish, chief revenue officer Gil Shai, vice president of research and development Ofir Ehrlich, and vice president of product Leonid Feinberg. CloudEndure's investors include Dell, Magma Venture Partners, and InfoSys.