10 Key Facts why Free Tools are more expensive

Most “FREE” tools have complex setup requirements, additional storage needs and require agent installation. It can often take a significant amount of time and effort to get these tools up and working properly. As an agentless solution that offers both a SaaS deployment or a Private Pop deployment, RiverMeadow’s market leading Cloud Migration Platform has proven to be faster to set up and deploy than any other cloud migration product in the market. Customers and partners often cite ease of use and deployment as one of the many reasons why they choose RiverMeadow over “FREE” tools.

“FREE” tools are used to support a single and specific cloud environment, but what if you are migrating to multiple clouds or you have a multi-cloud practice? RiverMeadow offers the only ‘pure play' Multi-Cloud Migration Platform in the market today. Standardizing and training on our Platform will save you considerable time and money, both in the short and longer term.

Another important consideration is Platform Support. It's a well-known fact that most migration projects require migrations to be performed and completed after business hours or on the weekends. With “FREE” tools, if you run into a problem there simply is no one to call and looking through Wikipages or online forums could likely put your projects at risk. RiverMeadow offers 24x7 support to make sure your cloud migration projects stay on track.

“The support from RiverMeadow was exceptional. Approachable and skilled, their specific cloud migration expertise combined with a willingness to go that extra mile meant I could focus much more on my job and oversee the project with complete confidence.” (Anthony Joyes, Hosting Strategy Manager, Cambridge University Press)

“FREE” tools are 'Lift and Shift' tools. The 'Lift and Shift' approach allows you to clone the workload 'as-is' and migrate it to a specific cloud. With RiverMeadow you have the unique ability to incrementally modernize as you move – an approach which we call ‘Lift and Modernize'. Whether you want to upgrade your OS to retire technical debt, resize disks to optimize storage usage or go from SQL Server to Azure SQL (Iaas to PaaS) to take advantage of native services, we can help.

You need to consider if a “FREE” tool can address all required use cases; physical, virtual, cloud to cloud, Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, SLES or Oracle Linux. Most “FREE” tools lack the applicable coverage and most have issues with physical servers. RiverMeadow handles all requirements and in all clouds as part of its standard offering so you can be sure that all of your migration needs will be met.

Successful large-scale migration projects require more than migration. They require tight and integrated project management, reporting and monitoring, discovery capability and a highly flexible migration capability. These are the essential pillars to migration volume. Most

“FREE” tools are missing these essential, integrated components. RiverMeadow provides them all in an integrated Multi-Cloud Migration Platform. “RiverMeadow enabled complex applications to be migrated at tremendous velocity and with a huge amount of surety" (Anthony Joyes, Hosting Strategy Manager, Cambridge University Press)

It is a well-known fact that most migration failures happen at the 11th hour causing you to have to start over or miss deadlines. RiverMeadow’s PreFlight validation automation capability checks 150+ parameters on every workload, either to warn you or block you in advance of any obstacles, or simply to tell you to proceed.

“The ability of RiverMeadow’s PreFlight capability enabled us to predict ahead of time the likely outcome of a migration which not only helped to significantly speed up the entire process, it also helped guarantee a successful result.” (James Duncan, Cloud Solutions Architect at Nimbus, working with the UK Government Department of Education)

As mentioned earlier, most “FREE” tools are agent-based and most require hypervisor access. This can be a tough sell, especially in shared environments. If you are migrating from hosted environments, hypervisor access may not be available. RiverMeadow does NOT require hypervisor access, meaning that you won’t face any technical limitations when you’re carrying out your cloud migration activities.

Customers require a Platform that can provide flexibility in terms of “how” you migrate to meet their specific business needs and requirements. It’s not uncommon to see certain environments requiring minimal to no downtime (mission critical apps), while others can afford extended down time (dev /test). In recognition of this requirement, RiverMeadow addresses the “how” with it's unique Hot, Warm and Cold migration capabilities in order to best suit your needs.

RiverMeadow offers advanced use case functionality which is well beyond the basic capability of "FREE" tools. It is the only product in the market that offers advanced migration capability under one Multi-Cloud Platform. Advanced use case capability includes the ability to automatically migrate: Oracle RAC, Domain controllers, OS Upgrades, VDI migrations and migration to Azure Files to name but a few examples.