Quantum CEO Jon Gacek teased what he called the “cloud offering” several times during the backup vendor’s earnings call this week but didn’t go deep into details beyond “our vmPro technology, along with our deduplication technology, is the basis of a cloud-based data protection offering that we will be introducing in the coming months.” In an interview after the call, he let on that the DXi would provide the backup, and there will likely be a service provider partner.

“We’ll probably launch with a partner first and go from there,” Gacek said.

Last October, Quantum revealed it plans to let SMB customers replicate data to the cloud from a new Windows-based NAS product. But that’s apparently not the same as what Gacek talked about this week. The SMB replication uses Datastor Shield software, which is different than the DXi software.