Datapipe Doubles Down On AWS Migrations With Purchase Of DualSpark

Amazon Web Services superstar Datapipe has extended its expertise into migration and automation by buying a 30-person firm founded by former AWS managers.

The Jersey City, N.J.-based managed services provider -- one of just six AWS MSPs -- said its purchase of Santa Monica, Calif.-based DualSpark is designed to take advantage of the newfound willingness of enterprise customers to extensively use public cloud.

"There's a lot more acceptance now to move full-production workloads into cloud environments," Richard Dolan, Datapipe's senior vice president of marketing, told CRN.

[Related: Datapipe, FortyCloud Team For New Two-Factor AWS Security Solution]

DualSpark's expertise is specifically in modernizing, refactoring and scaling legacy applications to function seamlessly in AWS ecosystems, said Matthew Scott, the company's vice president of public cloud and professional services.

The solution provider was founded just 15 months ago, but quickly realized that customers didn't want to manage and monitor cloud workloads once they went into production. So DualSpark would hand the account off to an MSP, but that would require the customer to sign a separate set of contracts and deal with a whole new set of salespeople.

"That start and finish wasn't completely what the customer was asking for," said Scott, who believes becoming part of Datapipe will provide DualSpark customers with a more streamlined experience.

Financial details of the acquisition, which closed last week, were not disclosed. The deal will take Datapipe to nearly 800 employees, towering above the other five flagship AWS managed services partners.

"There's no one of that size and scale in that [AWS Managed Service Provider Partner] group," said Scott, adding that DualSpark plans to leverage Datapipe's capital to grow its consulting and DevOps engineering staff.

Datapipe has recently found that more and more of their recent AWS engagements start with customers identifying the necessary tools to migrate to public cloud, Dolan said. That has become increasingly relevant as AWS rolls out hundreds of new services, meaning a tremendous amount of skill and experience is necessary for companies to move onto AWS, he said.

Datapipe's migration and automation services will continue to carry the DualSpark brand, Scott said. But DualSpark's sales and marketing teams will be fully integrated into Datapipe so that current and future customers can deal with a single sales rep for the entire services lifecycle.

This is Datapipe's second acquisition of 2015, with the solution provider buying big data cloud operator GoGrid in January. The solution provider -- which has carried AWS since 2009 -- also added Microsoft Azure to its line card in February, though Dolan said migration services similar to what DualSpark offers for AWS aren't currently available on Azure.

Datapipe also announced in July that it was teaming up with cloud security company FortyCloud to better address the security challenges associated with moving to public cloud.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 9, 2015