Atadata LLC is targeting the thorny problems of cloud migration with a managed platform that enables companies to shift workloads between on-premises and cloud environments without the use of software agents or emulation.

Designed to support large enterprise workloads and a wide variety of source and target environments, Atasphere merges several of the company’s existing migration modules into a single product that “decouples compute from its current infrastructure to make it optimized and portable,” said Charles Wright, founder and chief executive of the Atlanta-based firm. The product also provides a single interface for provisioning and monitoring cloud resources, along with resource optimization analytics that help cloud customers get more bang for the buck.

Atasphere isn’t intended for cross-platform migration but rather to move existing workloads to identical environments in the cloud. The company says its approach relies entirely on scripts rather than middleware or agents, which can slow performance and create compatibility problems.

“We don’t change the target system in any way,” Wright said. “We deploy a script [during the migration process] and remove it. There’s no change to the underlying system.” The company has built application program interface connections to most major server, virtual machine and container platforms, including Windows, most versions of Linux, Oracle Solaris and IBM AIX. “We plug into every operating systems that’s commercially available at this point,” as well as all major public cloud platforms, Wright said. The company says its ability to automate and orchestrate the deployment and removal of scripts is unique.

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Having migrated thousands of workloads since its 2012 founding, the company has assembled a large library of scripts to handle pretty much any migration issue, Wright said. “We can script to 90 percent of the workloads that are out there.”

The migration features are bundled with discovery and monitoring capabilities that “give you a single view into all your infrastructure, whether on premise, in the cloud or hybrid,” Wright said. “That gives you performance metrics to optimize for the best fit.”

Atasphere can be used to provision new compute services optimized for so-called “greenfield” installations as well as to create duplicate platforms for “brownfield” migration of existing workloads. The company is addressing the pain many organizations experience when trying to shift large applications to the cloud, where extensive dependencies and customizations added over a period of years can wreak havoc with the new host environment. Atadata claims to have shifted large SAP SE enterprise resource planning installations and even customized VMware Inc. virtual machines from on-premises servers to cloud platforms without a hitch.

Each migration is unique, of course, and Atadata doesn’t expect many customers to use it out of the box. For that reason, it has assembled a large stable of system integration partners, including Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Cap Gemini S.A., Atos SE, Arrow Systems Integration Inc. and Wipro Ltd. It’s also been certified as an approved solutions provider for Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft, Google, VMware Inc., CenturyLink Inc., Virtustream Inc., Oracle and IBM.

The software is licensed on a subscription basis, with significant discounts for long-term contracts. Wright said a typical subscription costs about $10,000 a month for discovery and migration capabilities for 1,000 nodes.

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