Probably the best Salesforce data protection solution

Odaseva, founded in 2012 by Sovan Bin, today CEO, is one of the emerging players in SaaS applications data protection with its Salesforce solution. Start to use Salesforce without a proven data protection solution like Odaseva is a risk, exposing critical data to a loss and impacting the day-to-day business of any enterprise. Even Salesforce recognizes its limitations and recommends an AppExchange third-party partner to protect data. Odaseva is one of them.

We have met the team during the recent IT Press Tour to learn more about their compelling Salesforce solution.

The team has demonstrated a real deep expertise of the Salesforce environment having developed probably one of the most advanced product to solve this data protection challenge. It runs as an redundant instance on Force.com taken data and metadata from the Salesforce cloud to store them on AWS. The RPO offered by the solution is reduced to 1 hour which is pretty good for this kind of application. We hope the team thinks about a CDP mode to track all changes in real-time and trigger a copy a bit like a copy-on-write mode.

Several enterprise key characteristics summarize Odaseva product philosophy:

1. Security at every level of the product with the 2-factors authentication single sign-on, data encryption in-transit with HTTPS/TLS 1.2, at-rest with AES-256 bits and for column, field and file.
2. Granularity for tasks, views, users, roles...
3. Performance with parallel streaming and full, incremental and partial manual or automatic backups.
4. Replication of backup images via SFTP or Azure Blob, AWS S3 and even in Salesforce Einstein Analytics.

The company has secured lots of famous customers such Toyota, GE, Orange Bank, Robert Half, Heineken or Schneider Electric who rely on Odaseva unique solution.

Odaseva provides also an archiving mode and can be considered today as a leader in GDPR for Salesforce with its capability to offer a right-to-access, right-to-portability and right-to-be-forgotten.

Surprisingly, the company didn't raise any [significant] financial round or very little amount by angels and founders but they don't communicate at all about that. We hope Odaseva will enter into a new phase soon as the company was founded 6 years ago and still seen as a small confidential but specialist gem. It means a new level of finance to boost their development is needed now. We expect also a horizontal product expansion to support other famous SaaS applications to increase their customer footprint, grow significantly their revenue and address competitive challenges.

Of course, at the same time, this SaaS data protection category receives more and more interest by usual backup suspects such Veritas, Druva, Asigra, Acronis and even recently by Commvault and NetApp so Odaseva must maintain its unique technology approach and again expand SaaS coverage. 2019 will be for sure an interesting year for SaaS application data protection.

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Quantum wags again its leadership team

Just a few months after Jamie Lerner arrived as CEO and Chairman of Quantum, the leadership team is shaked again. We don't see any more Molly Presley and Bill Britts on the executive page. We hope to learn more in December when we'll meet and visit the "new" Quantum with the IT Press Tour team...

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LM Cloud now available for GCP

LogicMonitor, leader in SaaS-based performance monitoring, just announced LM Cloud for GCP extending what is already available for AWS and Azure.

LM Cloud provides a single unified view of resources across top 3 cloud providers AWS, Azure and now GCP, delivering automation, auto-discovery, applications and operating system-level metrics, availability of service and spend to control costs.

This is the LogicMonitor answer to the multi-cloud market need delivering a comprehensive cloud monitoring solution establishing a new market standard. We expect now some more extension around container and microservices orchestration...

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Igneous strengthens data management

Igneous, among the few innovators in storage for a few years, continues its change and move towards a full software model. The solution has evolved a lot now targeting enterprise data challenges with hybrid cloud approach with its Unstructured Data Management aka UDM.

We remember when we met Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, in December 2016 with the IT Press Tour team with his promotion of an S3 compatible objet storage appliance with IP drives based on the coupling of a Marvell CPU board and HDD. That product named dataBox with its dataRouter was an brilliant approach a bit orthogonal with the SDS wave that implies to be hardware agnostic. This was for us the phase #1 of Igneous.

The phase #2 is related to the first software shift towards data management for the company seen for the second time in December 2017. Kiran spoke about secondary storage with data protection essentially backup, archive and tiering.

We understood some changes in the mission and clearly the strategy of Igneous is to move away from the hardware model and the recent software release - phase #3 - revealed a full data management approach with 3 key functions: Data Discover, Data Protect and Data Flow.

These 3 core elements feed an even more comprehensive UDM:

• Data Discover: Virtual views of data, easy search and classification thanks to AdaptiveScan and InfiniteIndex to answer famous "classic" questions of the How, What and Where about data growth, changes, ownerships... This is done without any agent.

• Data Protect: improved and enhanced backup, archive, tiering and DR for primary NAS, object and cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) at the API level for NetApp, Isilon, Qumulo and Flashblade. Three keys points: metadata are stored in InfiniteIndex, Intellimove moves copy data at high speed and AdaptiveScan tracks changes.

• Data Flow: API-driven and automated data movement to create end-users driven workflow for data analysis.

Igneous is ready to shake the unstructured data management market segment and with several competitors, overlaps exist so they must deliver a unique approach, what they do. Since we follow Igneous, the positioning of the company changed from a hardware/device-centric driven solution to a software-driven platform. As we'll meet Kiran again in December, we hope to learn new end-users deployments an d their outcomes, what was competition for these users, a bit of technology, how things work and a bit of future of course.

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Cleondris, a hidden player from Switzerland

NetApp Insight was also the opportunity to discover Cleondris, a swiss software company founded in 2006 by Christina Plattner, dedicated to the NetApp environment with specific add-ons built for ONTAP and HCI.

The company develops three products:

1. Cleondris Data Manager (CDM) is a backup, restore and indexing solution specifically designed for ONTAP.
2. SnapGuard is related to AIM - Access and Identity Management - existing in 2 flavors Enterprise and Light Editions, focusing on malicious access. The EE leverages fpolicy and EVTX monitoring.
3. HCI Control Center, the last product of the portfolio in beta now, targets NetApp HCI and offers storage failover with VMware integration and orchestrate backup intra HCI, to ONTAP and to Cloud/S3 destinations.

Interesting solutions with the difficulty for the vendor to maintain enough advance with its own competition or even NetApp internal developments. We'll see how this solution will evolve as the company is very confidential.

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LogicMonitor, a confidential leader

LogicMonitor, a leading SaaS-based hybrid IT performance monitoring platform - wow it's a bit long - delivered a very comprehensive session during the recent IT Press Tour in San Francisco.

Founded in 2008 with $142.9M of total capital raised so far, today with 250+ employees and 1500+ customers, the company, based in Santa Barbara, CA, got acquired by the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners last April. Vista had injected $130M in June 2016 to finally bought a majority stake later.

The IT is under a deep mutation for a few decades and cloud recently really shakes classic IT approaches with tons of hybrid deployments.

Performance monitoring is not new and it exists many players with big names such IBM, BMC, CA or SolarWinds, ScienceLogic and SaaS ones like Datadog.

LogicMonitor product is agent-less and provides 1200+ validated templates to accelerate adoption. It supports various workflows like Terraform, ServiceNow, Puppet, Ansible, HiChat, Slack or PagerDuty. Established for many years, LogicMonitor customers roster is impressive with famous names coming from various verticals like Adidas, Kayak, Netflix, Paypal, Airbnb, Etrade, Booking or Jetblue.

International expansion is a priority and Daniela Streng was just recruited as EMEA managing director to continue the market penetration. She came from Datto, an other Vista company, where she was sales director.

LM Cloud is the company answer to the cloud adoption with AWS and Azure with 3 core functions: resource performance, cloud provider health and cost optimization. It helps to monitor and be alerted for service limit capacity, scheduled maintenance and service availability. For cost, it provides visibility where subscriptions can be cut with spent thresholds alerts and predictions for future spend based on historical data. Infor uses LM Cloud on AWS to monitor 85,000 resources.

We heard that something will be announced soon for LM Cloud a key strategic initiative for future growth.

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OwnBackup made a push at Dreamforce 2018

OwnBackup, an emerging leader in Salesforce data protection founded in 2012, was pretty visible during Dreamforce 2018 as platinum sponsor with sessions, theatre and active bar.

And it was a battle with Odaseva, its closest competitor, as Spanning, the historical reference, was absent of the show as Kaseya bought them. It has pretty well illustrated the lack of data protection mechanisms on the Salesforce platform. In fact Salesforce even recommends third-parties solutions like the 3 offerings mentioned above. I've just wrote a long article on Data Protection at Dreamforce 2018 published in StorageNewsletter.

Famous for backup, OwnBackup took advantage of the event to unveil a new product, Archiver, that will be available in Q1/2019. The product is a direct attack to Odaseva approach having chosen a similar back-end, with probably MongoDB cloud, Odaseva relies on scalable database on AWS.

In addition, the company announced a blockchain service named ICE to provide integrity check for their data protection images.

Next few months will be interesting as competition will get tougher between Spanning, OwnBackup and Odaseva. Odaseva will have a clear advantage as we'll learn more about Odaseva during the 28th IT Press Tour mid-October in San Francisco. It would be good to meet OwnBackup as well in 2019.

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Where is (Da)Stratum?

DaStratum or Stratum, emerging player in Cloud Data Management incorporated in December 2015 and based at the Sunnyvale Plug-and-Play, shared strange indicators inviting us to believe that the company ceased its activity. At the time when we write this post:

• 2 co-founders - Kapil Kumar and Anil Sharma - work respectively for Google and AWS according to their LinkedIn page but they're still listed on the company web site.
• We discovered also that the company blog part is empty using the default template with random texts, giving not a good feeling.
• Crunchbase page for DaStratum doesn't exist.
• and interestingly, Rob Salmon, Cohesity COO and ex-NetApp COO, and Jay Kidd, ex-CTO NetApp also partner at Wing Venture Capital, seat at the board. Both of them don't list Stratum on their profile and Wing seems to not be an investor there as the company is not listed on its portfolio.

We're still in the fog.

In term of solution, the company, still in stealth (?), addresses the challenge to manage and protect cloud data at scale. The team has designed and built a multi-tier cloud file system named Stradl file system, that transparently allocates data block across multiple tiers of storage. They also offer advanced snapshot method with instantaneous, zero footprint copies and an approach to control the copy sprawl of data in cloud - it's so easy to create data that they live everywhere -.

It was/is promising but we're stil in the fog...

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Odaseva continues its expansion at a rapid pace

Present at Dreamforce 2018 as a silver sponsor, Odaseva, an emerging player developing a data management solution for Salesforce founded in 2012, continues the active promotion of its backup, archiving and compliance approach with full GDPR support. The solution is pretty comprehensive and the conference was a perfect example of that with 11 sessions presented by end-users, partners and Odaseva, all displaying the value and benefits. In a nutshell, Odaseva was very visible.

The company build a dedicated solution for Salesforce, probably the most integrated existing on the market, thanks to the expertise of Sovan Bin, its founding CEO. We hope the company will develop similar solution for other enterprise SaaS applications such Workday, Netsuite, Office 365, even Box or other ones. The competition between players is exactly there, who will be the first to be horizontal enough to grab the market.

The session scheduled during the 28th edition of the IT Press Tour the week of 15th of October in San Francisco will help us understand all the benefits and advantage of Odaseva vs. OwnBackup or Spanning. Great.

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Kaseya swallowed Spanning

Kaseya, an emerging leader in IT Infrastructure management, just announced the acquisition of Spanning, the data protection specialist for SaaS applications. Of course the amount of the transaction is not public. We noticed that Jeff Erramouspe, former CEO fo Spanning before and after the Dell period, left the company in March 2018, probably for a reason relates to the Kaseya talk at that time.

It's finally just aligned with what I predicted a few months ago as both companies belong to the Insight Venture Partners (IVP) portfolio. Kaseya started to resell Spanning following their partnership announced with Unitrends a few months ago. Definitely IVP is building something and could prepare a big sale following the consolidation of their fragmented data protection portfolio.

According to the press release, Spanning will stay in Austin and will operate as an independent entity.

Therefore, we understand why Spanning was not present at Dreamforce a few days ago, it was a surprise, but we know the reason behind. It has let Odaseva and OwnBackup monopolized the Salesforce data protection floor. It would be good to meet Kaseya with The IT Press Tour in 2019.

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