Software company Accelerite is squaring off against hybrid cloud heavyweights VMware and Nutanix with its hybrid cloud platform launched today.

The new Rovius Cloud is based on CloudPlatform, which Accelerite acquired from Citrix in March 2016. The software can be deployed on commodity hardware, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), or blade servers.

It is server, storage, and hypervisor agnostic, supporting both software-defined storage and legacy SAN and NAS appliances, as well as VMware’s vSphere hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Citirix XenServer, or any others.

“The key is our heterogeneity,” said Accelerite CEO Nara Rajagopalan. “We will support any hypervisor, any kind of storage, any kind of compute. That is a key differentiator because no enterprise is uniform.”

The platform also allows companies to federate on-premises data center resources with those of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) public cloud. In addition to using the Rovius Cloud to manage AWS workloads, the platform can also move these between the private and public clouds.

“When you are out of space in your data center, you can point to AWS and provision workloads there,” Rajagopalan said. “And when you are done, you can repatriate in your own data center to capture the new workload requirements.”

Rovius Cloud for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

Accelerite is shipping the hybrid cloud platform as an appliance — Dell EMC is the initial hardware partner with others including Lenovo to follow. Or companies can use their own hardware and deploy all, or pieces of, the Rovius Cloud software stack. “The intelligence is in the software,” said Rajesh Ramchandani, general manager of cloud services and platforms for Accelerite.

A key piece of this software is the Ops Manager, which is available both as an on-premises or cloud-based software deployment. The Ops Manager provides resource discovery, integrated infrastructure monitoring, log analytics, performance monitoring, and capacity planning.

“It’s a beautiful tool that allows you to run the cloud in a very seamless fashion,” Rajagopalan said.

Additionally, the Ops Manager has a managed service option, which allows managed service providers and other channel partners to offer the software as a pre-configured service.

Ramchandani claims Rovius Cloud costs less, and has a lower total cost of ownership, than either VMware or Nutanix hybrid cloud platforms.

“VMware vRealize Suite is the closest competitor to us,” he said. “They have most of the functionality we have. But our value proposition against VMware is that we can manage a multi-cloud environment much better. We do a fantastic job managing the multiple hypervisors, so you can have one data center with all Microsoft workloads and another with all VMware and we can manage both simultaneously.”