Five months after its birth from the merger of Gridstore Inc. and DCHQ Inc., HyperGrid Inc. is delivering its promised hybrid-cloud-in-a-box service with a few unique twists.

HyperCloud is described as a full scale-out application platform that can be set up in minutes and managed on premise, via a cloud service or as a combination of both. The company is also promising to help customers move to a container-based environment with on-the-fly migration of existing Java and .NET applications that automatically accommodates application dependencies and that provides for service discovery, scaling and integration with external services such as storage and log managers.

The company’s novel pricing model charges customers only for usage, even if they have HyperCloud servers and software on-site. Customers can start with no out-of-pocket cost by signing up for HyperGrid’s SaaS offering and deploying on premise only when and if they want, HyperGrid said. They can manage their own systems or choose to delegate that task to HyperGrid. They can also deploy applications across both on-premise and cloud platforms and move them back and forth.

“We’ll give you a best-fit environment that includes both on-premise and cloud apps,” said Manoj Nair, chief product officer at HyperGrid. “We’re trying to get people to think of a cloud-like model where they’re consuming and paying only for what they use.” In addition to core infrastructure, HyperGrid delivers virtual desktop infrastructure, SQL Server and unified cloud management on an as-a-service basis.

An orchestration platform called HyperForm automates the provisioning and management of infrastructure and application environments with a self-service model for virtual machine creation, approval workflows and granular entitlements. Developers can create reusable application templates to automate deployment and lifecycle operations across more than 18 public cloud environments.

Not like the others

Numerous vendors are now shipping prepackaged cloud platforms, including big vendors like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. and Oracle. All boast of enabling customers to get private clouds up and running in no time. HyperGrid differs from the big system vendors by being hardware- and software-independent and by enabling the migration to containers. “The big companies are very focused on the infrastructure mindset. We are trying to create an open, application-centric way of getting you started,” Nair said. HyperGrid is currently shipping servers from Dell Technologies Inc. and HPE and has standardized on Docker containers, but the business model is vendor-independent, Nair said.

The company is putting containers front and center. Part of its service includes “containerizing” any applications the customer wishes to move to its platform. Java and .NET applications are relatively quick and easy to migrate, said Amjad Afanah, vice president of product management. Legacy applications can also be handled as long as HyperGrid has access to binary files and dependencies.

That feature gives customers choice, Nair said. “Once we containerize your existing apps, if you don’t like our infrastructure in the future you can move to somebody else,” he said. “Most vendors try to lock you into their infrastructure.”

Customers that choose to deploy on premises pay nothing for the hardware up front. Rather, they’re billed monthly based on usage. Hardware is upgraded at the end of the contract term, which typically runs between two or three years. Average cost of the HyperGrid environment is about half of what customers would pay for comparable Amazon Web Services support, the company said.

Pricing is per container. For example, a customer who signs up for 100 containers, each with two gigabytes of memory and 10 gigabytes of storage as well as two processors would pay an average of $12.25 per month per container, Nair said. Volume discounts and service level agreements are available.

HyperGrid has raised $44 million in venture funding and is growing at a 350 percent rate on a quarter-over-quarter basis, Nair said.