Earlier this week, Actifio Inc. released its Multi-Cloud Mobility and Automation solution with a focus on disaster-recovery tailored for public cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure.

The latest release highlighted the copy data management software company’s move to strengthen its position within the enterprise cloud ecosystem. It also led some analysts to speculate on where the company’s strategy will ultimately take it as it surfs the multicloud seas.

“Which side of the wave are they on?” asked John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Actifio Data Driven event in Boston, Massachusetts. “Are they too much out front with virtualization, and the cloud will take them away. Or are they riding the cloud wave, making that an enabler? Because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is whether they can scale to containers and microservices.”

Furrier was joined by Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, and they discussed Actifio’s cloud partnerships and the ever-shifting competitive landscape it faces in the backup and recovery market (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Building on partnerships

Actifio’s most-recent announcement recognizes interest by customers in moving workloads between clouds with backup protection in the event of a problem. In addition to the major public cloud providers, the firm has formed partnerships with a wide range of enterprise players, including VMware Inc., Nutanix Inc. and Red Hat Inc., building on its on-premises roots.

“Actifio started very much in the data center,” Miniman noted. “They were before this cloud wave really took off. They’ve got all the partnerships in the cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors like Cohesity and Rubrik.”

The competitive landscape for Actifio also gained another dimension when AWS launched Backup in January. The new service is a tool for developers to back up data on various AWS services and on-prem applications.

“Amazon has said if you don’t move fast, we’re just going to keep gobbling,” Vellante said. “Can these specialists survive?”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Actifio Data Driven event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Actifio Data Driven event. Neither Actifio Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Actifio Inc.