Sureline Systems looks to ease the pain of application migration with SUREedge Analyst: Agatha Poon 27 Aug, 2015 Five-year-old Sureline Systems is led by a team of seasoned technical and business leaders who are eager to remove the complexity of application migration across heterogeneous IT environments. The company is targeting enterprises and MSPs with its flagship product SUREedge, an agentless software platform that is touted to enable 'application migration from any to any.' In its latest version, Sureline has deepened platform integration with strategic partners including Nutanix and CenturyLink, and demonstrated some interesting capabilities, such as global de-dupe replication and many-to-one topology, which the company believes will help differentiate it in a crowded market. The 451 Take While navigating its way through a sea of competitive offerings, Sureline has caught the attention of the investor community. SUREedge does what it says and has some interesting differentiators that may help entice service provider customers and channel partners. We would agree that the near-term opportunity for Sureline is to push forward use cases around datacenter consolidation and disaster recovery/business continuity capability, but it won't be without challengers. The market for workload management and recovery is likely to keep growing as the move to hybrid IT continues to take hold in the enterprise and service provider markets. The next step for Sureline is to amplify its strategic imperative of being agnostic across the entire stack (applications, hypervisors and systems). Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 1
Context Santa Clara, California-based Sureline Systems was co-founded by president and CEO Ravi Goyal and VP of sales Kiyotaka Okubo the pair had more than two decades of experience in the storage and network-related hardware and software business. Prior to Sureline, Goyal was the co-founder of Datalane Systems, which has been acquired by Hitachi-LG Data Systems, and Okubo was the country manager at ONStor, which is now part of Avago's acquired assets when it took over ONStor's former acquirer LSI Corporation. The company is privately funded, with offices in the US and Japan (Tokyo), and a product development center in Pune, India. It has about 50 employees and raised a little more than $10m in two funding rounds, including a $4.5m series B round in May, led by corporate strategic investor Unigen, with the participation of existing investors Violin Memory and prominent angels. Products SUREedge comprises three major components: SUREedge Migrator (application onboarding and migration), SUREedge DR (local BC/DR, cloud DR and site-to-site DR) and SUREedge Enterprise Manager (management stack with a single pane of glass view), which work in tandem to achieve migration, DR and BC in enterprise applications. By capturing metadata and configuration information of target applications and systems, Sureline says the software platform is able to provide full application migration and recovery to and from any system (physical or virtual), hypervisor and cloud environment (public, private or hybrid). Sureline emphasizes that the platform is able to support a complete lifecycle management of application mobility. Other key features available in this release include global de-duplication, recovery planner/simulator, ultra-bandwidth friendly de-dupe replication, automatic failover and failback (for local DR only), and many-to-one topology. With tools like app plug-ins and cloud gateways, Sureline says SUREedge can quickly create recovery points for any windows and Linux-based applications and cloud infrastructures. Out of the box, Sureline supports major hypervisor technologies including Citrix XenServer, Hyper-V, VMware, KVM and OpenStack, and leading cloud providers like AWS, Windows Azure and Rackspace. On the application front, it provides support for Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and SQL, among other applications. In its latest release, the company has also deepened its product integration with the hyperconvergence specialist Nutanix (which is currently deploying its own version of VMs built on top of KVM) as well as cloud provider CenturyLink. In the case of Nutanix, Sureline's SUREedge has Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 2
completed product verification testing under the Nutanix Ready program. Therefore, customers can have a seamless application onboarding and migration experience to Nutanix's infrastructure with no compatibility issue. The integration with CenturyLink, on the other hand, lies in its marketplace provider program. Under the program, cloud customers now can download Sureline's SUREedge out of CenturyLink Blueprints, which essentially serves as a service catalog for configuration scripts, software installation and cloud tasks. In terms of pricing, application migration includes a one-time migration fee and a tiered pricing model based on number of systems to be migrated. For DR, it's a monthly recurring charge based on the number of CPU cores deployed for a particular system. If the system is a VM, it's based on the number of vcpu. Strategy Given that Sureline has yet to sell directly into the enterprise segment, channel partners represent the core of the company's go-to-market strategy. Upon securing the series B funding round, it has made good progress in building out its partner network. Aside from working with distributer Cloud Harmonics and nearly two dozen channel partners in North America, Dubai, Singapore, India and Japan, Sureline is in advanced discussions with a selected group of storage vendors and cloud service providers to help expand its industry expertise and geographical reach. The company has recently struck a deal with global IT provider SHI International. Under the vendor goods reseller agreement, SHI will offer SUREedge to a global customer base that spans North America, Europe and Asia. In terms of revenue, about 50% of its business comes from outside North America today because all revenue from overseas is for perpetual licensing, whereas most of North America revenue is from subscription. Customers Sureline claims more than 100 customers that are actively utilizing its software for application migration and or DR. Roughly 80% of customers deploy SUREedge for DR/BC scenarios today, the company says. With that said, Sureline has experienced a greater use of SUREedge for application migration during the past three months. In any case, the goal is to create upsell and cross-sell opportunities through supporting multiple use cases from onboarding customers to hyperconverged infrastructure, to site-to-site DR and DC consolidation, to on-premises to cloud DR/migration, to cloud-to-cloud and cloud to DC, DR and migration. Geographically speaking, companies in North America represent the majority (70%) of its customer base today. To that end, an effective channel partner network is paramount in order to grow internationally. Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 3
Competition Sureline has joined a growing list of technology specialists and well-established vendors in the ever-growing cloud management service segment. In the context of server and workload migration and DR, Cristie Software, RiverMeadow Software, Racemi, RackWare, RightScale and PlateSpin (part of Novell) are examples of active players driving workload portability between multiple IT environments physical, virtual or cloud. Other vendors such as Scalent Systems (which has assimilated into Dell, and now the platform is sold as Advanced Infrastructure Manager) and Egenera could be challengers in the market for dynamic workload management. Egenera touts granular disaster-recovery capabilities with PAN Manager. When it comes to migrating enterprise workloads to the cloud, established management vendors such as BMC, CA Technologies and HP surely have a ready-made enterprise customer base and the breadth of product portfolio to meet diverse needs. For application onboarding and migration opportunities, Sureline may bump up against the likes of Appcara, CliQr, ElasticBox and UShareSoft while prospecting. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Sureline has a seasoned management team with technical and business leaders demonstrating a good understanding of enterprise and channel requirements. SUREedge provides such useful features as global de-duplication and recovery planner, which may appeal to customers with distributed enterprise environments. The company remains small in scale with limited resources, and it lacks the profile of some enterprise-focused competitors. Opportunities Threats The market for workload management and recovery is likely to keep growing as the move to hybrid IT continues to take hold in the enterprise and service provider markets. As competition intensifies with new offerings coming from both established vendors and technology startups, Sureline will have its work cut out to differentiate its product offering. Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 4
Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; 2015. This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: www.451research.com Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 5