Startup Stratoscale on Monday introduced enhancements to its hybrid cloud software designed to bring Amazon public cloud to enterprises' on-premises data centers.

The Israeli company introduced Stratoscale Symphony 3, software that allows an enterprises to build a small Amazon Web Services Inc. region in its data center.

Stratoscale Symphony allows enterprises to create hybrid clouds built on a uniform AWS infrastructure -- the same environment in both the public cloud and on premises, Stratoscale CEO and founder Ariel Maislos tells Light Reading. "When the public and on-prem environment is different, hybrid cloud is difficult and the transition is in only one direction -- outward to the public cloud. With a similar environment, you can move both ways," he says.

Stratoscale Symphony includes a suite of compute, virtualized and containerized services; the new version supports a built-in Kubernetes engine to orchestrate containers, as well as object store, software-defined networking capabilities, and a catalog of more than 140 enterprise and open source applications, including Hadoop and Wordpress.

"The net effect is giving you an on-prem AWS region in your own data center that allows you to run 90% of the services that run on AWS," Maislos says.

Amazon and its partners have recently been taking steps to enhance the hybrid cloud capabilities of the AWS public cloud. That allows AWS to step up the competitive pressure on Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Azure and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Cloud, whose strength is in the hybrid cloud, as well as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), which is pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. AWS is looking to maintain its commanding lead in the public cloud market; it has the overwhelming majority of market share.

As part of its hybrid cloud push, AWS this month introduced software it calls Greengrass, which allows enterprises to run AWS software on their own appliances. Greengrass is designed for IoT devices and doesn't compete with Symphony, Maislos says. (See Amazon Takes Cloud on the Road.)

"Greengrass is about ingesting data and transferring it to the public cloud," Maislos says. Greengrass is designed to provide local compute and storage for IoT applications where making the trip to public cloud central data centers is impractical, due to network bandwidth and latency issues. Stratoscale Sympony solves a different problem, according to Maislos.

"We're in the business of transforming the data center into an AWS compatible environment," he says.

VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) launched a hybrid cloud partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. in October to run VMWare vSphere software on the AWS cloud, allowing enterprises to run the same vSphere environment in both their own data centers and the AWS cloud. (See Enemies No More: Amazon & VMware Partner on Cloud.)

Again, not competitive, Maislos says.

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"It's the opposite of what we're making," Maislos says. "It allows vSphere to manage AWS. We're the opposite, transforming your data center into an AWS region."

Stratoscale is about three and a half years old, with 100 people, and more than $70 million in funding from investors including Battery Ventures , Bessemer Venture Partners , Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Western Digital.

Before Stratoscale, Maislos founded fiber-to-the-home pioneer Passave, acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2006, where Maislos served as vice president of strategy. Later, Maislos founded Pudding Media, which pioneered speech recognition, in 2006, as well as Anobit, a provider of SSD technology acquired by Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) in 2012, where Maislos served as senior director in charge of Flash storage. (See PMC to Acquire Passave,

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud