Druva, the cloud data protection and management vendor, on Tuesday announced its first-ever acquisition, that of AWS backup (BU) and disaster recovery (DR)-focused vendor CloudRanger.

With the addition of CloudRanger’s AWS products, the Druva Cloud Platform, introduced last August, will be able to support cloud-native unified coverage for data protection and management that spans enterprise on-premises environments to cloud environments, such as AWS and Microsoft Office 365, the company said.

“Not only is this our first acquisition, but it helps us complete our vision around providing that end-to-end capability from on-premises to businesses that are operating within AWS,” Dave Packer, vice president of products and alliances marketing, told us.

Taking its lead from customers, the CloudRanger acquisition allows Druva a faster route to market for AWS. Its own Apollo for Cloud Workloads on AWS was Druva’s development effort that trailed that of CloudRanger.

“CloudRanger provides a great coverage for AWS services, supporting EC2, RDS and Redshift. It allows our customers to address a lot of the pain points that they’re already having today,” said Packer. “Customers need a way to manage the backup and disaster recovery across regions and accounts.” Apollo, available in early access, was Druva’s attempt to develop the AWS capabilities it acquired with CloudRanger. The current Apollo product only targets EC2, Packer noted.

Dave Packer

Dave Packer

“This is an important step in achieving our vision to provide a solution that addresses the challenges our customers face as part of the very real and necessary journey of moving to the cloud,” said Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva. Both Druva and CloudRanger are based on cloud-native architectures.

CloudRanger will continue to be available on the AWS Marketplace. Druva will simultaneously work on product integration with the Druva Cloud Platform, in order to provide customers with a single point of access to their on-premises environment — as well as the AWS services environment. The integration work should be completed in the next quarter, Packer said.

In the meantime, Druva will continue to sell the CloudRanger and Druva Cloud Platform. CloudRanger has an authorized partner program for MSPs and system integrators. Druva sells directly but also via MSPs and reseller partners.

Just two years ago, Druva channel sales were a measly 10 percent. Today, that number is closer to 50 percent.

“Right now, we’re investing a lot of dollars into the channel side of our business because that’s where we see the greatest growth potential,” said Packer.

While Druva didn’t share much about financials and numbers, Packer did say that CloudRanger has about 300 customers and noted that CloudRanger will operate as a subsidiary of Druva. CloudRanger was recognized as an AWS hot startup in June 2017.