As previously reported with our Storadera article yesterday, IT Europa met a variety of data management companies in London this week on the IT Press Tour, to find out about their channel scale-up plans.
Another of those companies was Auwau, a name derived from “automation” and “wow”, whose Cloutility offering is a locally installed (on-premise) web-based software solution for delivering backup-as-a-service for MSPs and enterprises.
It plugs into your backup/data protection infrastructure and, among other features, provides role-based self-service, monitoring, custom reporting and alerting, and recurring billing automation, all organised in a secure multi-tenant environment. It is designed to “reflect the user’s real world of business units”, including resellers, partners, customers and departments.
The reporting engine allows you to automatically generate and send out daily reports and alerts to all tenants. The built-in billing automation tool allows the setting up of subscription-based recurring billing of your customers and/or your departments.
A key feature of Cloutility is its integrations with other business applications. Through the Cloutility REST API you can build integration with your existing applications and platforms, giving you the required view of your business.
Cloutility currently supports and integrates with a mix of secure data protection and S3-storage technologies as a single pane of glass, including IBM Storage Protect, Rubrik, Cohesity, IBM Storage Defender Data Protect, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and PoINT Archival Gateway.
That PoINT integration, we’ve reported on before. The bringing together of Cloutility and PoINT’s Archival Gateway enables providers to offer tape-based object storage as-a-service, with user and authorisation management entirely on the customer side.
PoINT Archival Gateway has been updated to allow customers to send data to disks and between tapes and disks, using a single access/management point to accommodate “warmer” data via a “unified object storage” solution.
PoINT says it is looking for more OEMs, system integrators and VARs to help extend its footprint in the market. Existing partners already include Computacenter, Atos, IBM, Spectra, NetApp and SVA, among others.
But back to Copenhagen, Denmark-based Auwau, with Thomas Bak (pictured), founder and CEO, telling us the company’s partners now include Advania Sweden, unit it, seeweb, JN DATA, safespring, bloosite, and christie, in addition to IBM distributor Arrow – Cloutility is listed in the IBM product catalogue.
Despite the recent activity however, the provider is still small, with just three staff and annual sales standing at under €1m. Bak said the firm was “profitable”, and that there were “above 50” installations of the Cloutility platform so far.
The firm charges based on data capacity. By way of example, we asked how much a retailer with 20 shops, for instance, would typically pay to use Cloutility, and Bak said it would cost €300 per month to handle 25 terabytes of data.
Like with most data management deployments, how long is a piece of string when it comes to price, but Bak was happy with the niche Cloutility seems to have found in the market so far.
*For those that don’t know, “clout” is English slang for having influence, power, or enjoying popularity. Clout is also English slang to hit or “thump” someone or something.
More to follow from the IT Press Tour in London...
