Clumio, am emerging
data protection player, introduced for the first time ever in
July 2018, just exits from stealth with a series B round of $40M. This round follows a series A of $11M in December 2017 just 2 months after tis inception, the total raised now reaches $51M.
The company, based in Santa Clara and founded in October 2017 by Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil and Woon Jung, plays in the
SaaS flavor of data protection, a segment that begins to be well populated. I invite the reader to check the table of SaaS backup player I publish regularly on StorageNewsletter.
It's interesting to see that Clumio has JW Thompson on its board like Rubrik, an other DP player, we find also Mark Leslie on the board of Zerto. Bizarre.
The genesis of the solution comes from the fact that data is fragmented - nothing new here - meaning that data is everywhere, on-premies and in the cloud controlled by proprietary, commercial and SaaS applications and services.
Poojan Kumar illustrates the creation of Clumio articulating 4 key points:
- Business opportunity as applications and data move to the cloud. The question is what can be disrupted in data and storage globally with cloud and SaaS in mid.
- Cloud-native architecture really means ability to scale and answers users requirements and growth.
- SaaS first so it's not about a product or a license but a service with a subscription model of course.
- Cloud agnostic to offer an ubiquitous service.
Some examples are Snowflake for data warehouse and Sumo Logic for log management but also Zuora, Salesforce the model and reference, Box or Dropbox, LinkedIn or Zadara in Cloud Storage.
Clumio is about
protecting on-premises and cloud VMs with on-premises agents as virtual appliances offering local data dedupe, compression and encryption, in-transit and at-rest, before touching the public cloud. The control and management is done centrally in the cloud, currently on AWS, with scheduling, cataloging... and obeys to the recent wave of micro-services requirements and multi-tenancy fundamental for modern cloud services. The backup approach is to provide an "incremental for ever" approach by replicating data quickly after the first installation illustrating the rapidness and simplicity to activate the online service. The product offers a file granularity with a file search and restore capability. Clumio develops a special new metadata file system to track all data activities and lifecycle and store data on S3. It illustrates again what I
wrote a few months ago about S3 eating the world.
Clumio started to deploy the
v1.0 last May and several instances are running and seam to satisfy users.
The pricing model is to
charge per VM per year without any links to data volumes and there is no charge for restores. It turns out that Clumio doesn't target SaaS applications as users don't rely on VMs, think about Salesforce or Google Drive and you get the idea. The underlying infrastructure is managed and controlled by Clumio so completely transparent for users. Clumio plans to add a partner program as the strategy targets the channel.
Don't be confused Clumio is not a SaaS backup for SaaS applications such Salesforce or Office365 but a backup as a Service for the enterprise for VM deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Interesting solution and Clumio has to start somewhere so AWS is a good choice of course. We hope the company to add GCP and Azure and support of SaaS applications as well such Office 365, Salesforce and even Google Drive.
A big surprise to read that there was not other solution on the market according to Poojan. I think he forgets a few players like HYCU, Rubrik, Cohesity, Druva or Actifio to name a few and for sure pure SaaS players with SaaS applications protection such OwnBackup, Kaseya Spanning, CloudAlly or Datto Backupify. The battle of next gen data protection will be even more dense and interesting in 2020... Let's meet at VMworld to get more detailed on this attractive data protection approach.
Rubrik, one of the leader on the next gen data protection, just confirmed the tenure of its first User Conference named Rubrik Forward in May 2020, from 11 to 13th, in Chicago. You can visit the site here. Also you can follow some IT conferences with the ConfDir portal I continue to maintain for a few years now.
