One unintended consequence of the popularity of cloud computing is that it has cast a harsh spotlight on the inability of many enterprise data centers to match the automated convenience of the public cloud. IBM and Catalogic Software Inc. are hoping to make a dent in that perception by teaming up to apply Catalogic’s ECX software-defined copy data management software to several of IBM’s storage offerings.

Catalogic ECX is described as an agentless software platform that installs into an organization’s existing infrastructure as a virtual appliance and leverages the public APIs of storage controllers, storage software systems and hypervisors to automate setup and provisioning time that averages three to four weeks in a typical IT shop, according to Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic.

That compares to the minutes that cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers typically offer. The problem isn’t that storage provisioning is all that complex, Walsh noted. Even in an enterprise, setup times shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes. However, request backlogs can stretch fulfillment times to weeks. “We make your current [storage] infrastructure as agile as Amazon,” he said.

Catalogic isn’t particularly well known, but its core technology has been around since the late 1990s. The company was formed when Syncsort sold its data protection business to an investor group in 2013. That group in turn spun off the data protection business into a new firm that became Catalogic.

In July, 2014, the company hired Wash, a storage-industry “whiz kid…who is best known for taking small, relatively unknown product-focused companies that need clearer strategy and execution chops, building a team, pointing them at a problem, gaining traction and then selling to a larger player who needs to fill a gap,” noted Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante in an analysis at the time.

ECX uses a portfolio of templates that cover the standard profiles that IT organizations use to provision storage. These templates can be provided to users to allocate their own storage instead of filing requests with IT. The result is dramatic time savings on both the administrative and user side, Catalogic said. The solution should be particularly appealing to companies in regulated and security-sensitive industries, which want to keep many operations in their own private clouds.

IBM and Catalogic are aiming the partnership at two basic scenarios. One is to automate the creation of public cloud application environments that duplicate those that live on premise. This permits the public cloud to be used for “cloudbursting” unpredictable volumes or for backup and disaster recovery.

The other is to enable IT organizations to support the agile DevOps approach to application development, in which developers control both the application and the environment in which it runs. DevOps has been a prime driver of cloud computing because of the provisioning flexibility that public clouds provide. IBM would like to get a bigger share of the storage that enterprises use for DevOps on premise.

ECX has been validated for use with IBM’s Storwize and SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000, Spectrum Protect flash copy manager and SoftLayer cloud. Prices start at $5,000 per array. The two companies will stage a live online event to discuss the partnership on Tuesday, Feb. 2 at 11AM EST.

Walsh joined John Furrier and Vellante on theCUBE at the IBM Insight 2014 conference to discuss Catalogic and the concept of a ‘blue ocean’ for the evolution of data management with copy data management.