Microsoft bolsters cloud migration tools with Movere acquisition
Microsoft's move to acquire Movere is a bet that the startup's IT infrastructure monitoring and analysis tools can help it attract more on-premises workloads to Azure.
Microsoft has added to its cloud migration tools with the purchase of Movere, maker of a software platform that continuously scans and collects data on customers' IT infrastructure.
Movere's technology will join Microsoft's Azure Migrate services and similar tools from partners, according to a blog post. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Movere was founded in 2008 and is based in Bellevue, Wash. Its platform's cloud migration tools use agentless bots that can scan as many as 1,000 servers per hour, according to its website. Customers get a dashboard view of their environments, with analytics and visualizations generated by the data Movere captures.
The platform helps customers plan for a cloud migration through what Movere calls Actual Resource Consumption scans on their existing environments. It tells them with 99.9% accuracy what is being used and to what degree; spots and tracks usage spikes; and gives insight into why specific IT assets are seeing more demand.
Movere then couples a map of the customer's IT infrastructure with geospatial data, which helps determine what regions of either Azure or AWS would be best to use from an economic and operational standpoint.
Customers can also use Movere's cloud migration tools for IT optimization tasks such as updating unsupported apps or cutting down on server sprawl, the company said.
Stephen Elliot
There is some degree of cybersecurity capability in the platform in that Movere can send customers alerts regarding matters such as questionable login and password resets, the company said.
A Microsoft spokesperson said there would be more information in the future about whether Movere -- which competes with products such as ServiceNow, SolarWinds and VMware vRealize Operations Manager -- would continue to support AWS following the acquisition.
Making cloud migration easier
Overall, Movere's discovery and scanning engine is strong and should help Microsoft migration services teams and partners do their jobs faster, said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC.
The reality is that every public cloud provider has to continue to make it easier to migrate onto their platform.
Stephen ElliotAnalyst, IDC
"The reality is that every public cloud provider has to continue to make it easier to migrate onto their platform," Elliot said. "They have to reduce the friction, and deliver a better customer experience. Discovery is a foundational migration requirement for any customer."
Moreover, during the past several years, many IT and business executives have drastically underestimated the amount of time and effort it takes to migrate workloads to a public cloud, according to Elliot.
"In a tightening economic environment, these types of capabilities start to pay out exponential dividends," he said.
All IaaS providers have the challenge of attracting workloads from on-premises environments to their cloud. A secondary challenge within that is identifying which aspects of a customer's environment would benefit most, said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research in Cupertino, Calif.
Movere gives Microsoft the ability to understand customer footprints better, and this is best done through a software platform, Mueller said. "Humans are slow and expensive." CIOs can expect Microsoft to use Movere to help sell Azure, in the sense of offering to show customers which workloads they could benefit from moving, Mueller added.
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