Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian?

Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second.

Sramana Mitra: This is a crowded space. What was so special about HYCU?

Simon Taylor: A couple of different things. If you look at the history of data protection, you go back to Veritas. It was built for Unix. Commvault was built for Windows. Veeam was built for VMWare. Even Rubrik and Cohesity were essentially building storage appliances that backed up VMWare. Druva was doing AWS backup. What we saw is that in a true multi-cloud world, none of these models work.

The market was crying out for a way to manage data state and get true equivalency across on-prem and on-cloud. We built native integrations into every hyperscalar and we just up levelled that data under a single pane of glass, and added auto data migration and disaster recovery. We SaaSified multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service.

Sramana Mitra: Are you in competition with Portworx / Pure Storage?

Simon Taylor: In many ways, we offer all the benefits of Veeam for VMWare and Druva for AWS. We do all of it without degrading the quality of the servers. We’ve gone through the process of building purpose-built integrations into every single data source.

Sramana Mitra: Who is the competitor?

Simon Taylor: We compete against all of them. Our ability to provide true multi-cloud backup across multi-cloud environments is second to none. The data protection industry is going in a strange direction where everybody is trying to sell storage. To be an honest broker in the backup space, you want to stay away from that. We don’t want to own your data. We want to help you become a more resilient company. That’s why HYCU calls itself Resiliency-as-a-Service. We now have 3,100 customers in 78 countries.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the first hundred customers? Where was the traction?

Simon Taylor: I took the same note from my prior playbook. There is a gentleman who I have a lot of respect for. His name is Dheeraj Pandey.

Sramana Mitra: I just talked to him yesterday.

Simon Taylor: Is he back from Slovenia?

Sramana Mitra: He’s back here.

Simon Taylor: I partnered with Dheeraj. I remember him saying, “We’re not getting into the backup space. If you go out and build a purpose-built integration for Nutanix, I will support you.” I took that very seriously. I went back to the team and said, “We have this multi-cloud approach, but we’re going to start with Nutanix.”

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Simon Taylor: 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Nutanix has a lot of customers at this point. Was Dheeraj offering you channel access?

Simon Taylor: Dheeraj is much more careful than that. What he said was, “Let me see it, and let’s see if it works.” What surprised him is I came back a week before one year was up. My team had done an astonishing job. So Dheeraj introduced us to the whole team and he helped set up a strategic alliance. It became a touchstone for us. Then we expanded.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU
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