Druva Phoenix is heading ROBO-wards via the public cloud

Who's their competition?

Druva now sees itself as a data protection and governance company for distributed data in distributed mobile enterprises. It’s not like Mozy, which is a consumer play, or Avamar, which is an enterprise play. Singh’s reaction to Google Cloud Nearline Storage is interesting: “I don’t think Google understands the enterprise. It’s okay at slideware. We think Microsoft [Azure] is better. Think SLAs, etc. … Google thinks of the enterprise as a large consumer.”

Competitors include HP Autonomy and Symantec, which appears to think that what works in the data centre will work at the end-points. CommVault is characterised as being biased towards on-premises data stores. Code42 is described as having a “cheapest backup you can buy” approach and lacks eDiscovery. IBM’s Tivoli is ten years old and uses too much storage, with Singh saying: “1PB of deduped [InSync] storage for Pfizer and its 80,000 endpoints would be around 8PB” with a Tivoli approach.

Roadmap

Druva started expanding to the ROBO market in 2014 as well as building out its infrastructure. Rick Powles came on board in September last year as the regional VP for EMEA charged with setting up an EMEA go-to-market infrastructure. Pete Yamasaki is his oppo, regional VP for APAC and he joined in June 2014.

Its roadmap has two directions, one end-point information governance and the other remote sites. The end-point idea is to “aggressively expand our portfolio from end-points to users. Such users will store data in the cloud and on their devices. Singh said: “We want to know more about the user. We’ll collect logs of what he’s doing for a compliance and recovery focus. We see this as a huge market. We’ll do archive per-user and not per-service (like Exchange.)”

Turning to remote offices, he said: “Remote sites have different backup needs from the data centre. A Phoenix product line is being built with exceptionally long-term retention for data. We should think of doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies and retail outlets. Places with no on-site support. Phoenix will be a single silo for these remote sites.”

Druva has an end-point backup deal with tyre company Continental and is now moving to cover its remote sites. Backups and tape-style archive data will go to the cloud instead of to Continental’s data centres.

Singh said that remote site coverage is a logical extension from end-point coverage. There is the same need to understand apps and remote site IT resources devoted to backup can be reduced in the same way InSync reduces end-point CPU, memory and network resource use.

He is very bullish on the cloud, saying: “Data centres will die in the next five years … virtualised apps will move to the cloud.”

The $20bn backup and archive business will move to the cloud. In Singh's vision of the future this is a very specific undertaking: “The public cloud; there is no private cloud.”.

Druva’s vision comes from selling its software to 3,000 customers for use by three million users. On-premises backup and archival stores will largely disappear by 2020. That’s Jaspreet Singh’s stark message. Let’s come back in twelve months time and see how it's panning out. ®