Like a periscope emerging form under the waves and then gradually revealing first a conning tower and next a massive submarine hull, HYCU’s product strategy is coming into view.
It is progressing from being a niche backup supplier focussed on the Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform markets to being a general on-premises and multi-public cloud provider of backup and disaster recovery services. This became clear as a result of a briefing in London today from Simon Taylor, the CEO, and VP Engineering Goran Garevski,
There are two sideways moves here. First, on-premises where it’s spreading out from its Nutanix niche to VMware and KVM hypervisor servers in general and, second, in the cloud where it will expand from its GCP base to provide similar cloud-native services to AWS and Azure cloud users.
The foundational data protection software needed for the on-premises expansion already exists; HYCU backs up applications using VMware and KVM inside the already-supported Nutanix environment.
Basic cloud-native code for the public cloud expansion exists for GCP. No ground-up code production effort is needed to migrate this to AWS and Azure. Adding disaster recovery on top is growing an existing code base and not developing one from scratch either.
From silo managing pains to single pane of glass
There’s more. It’s all very well supporting a wider group of data protection environments on premises and in the public cloud but customers don’t want to have to manage three on-premises backup silos and three more in the public cloud. They want data protection as a service and that means they ideally need to manage the component parts through a central management facility. A single pane of glass instead of the pain of managing several different pieces.
HYCU is bringing out Protegé, a central management facility covering its on-premises and AWS, Azure and GCP public cloud offerings. It will help with application migration between the on-premises and various public cloud environments as well.
Blocks & Files thinks the appeal of a centrally-managed data protection service covering the on-premises and public cloud worlds will be strong, as it reduces management effort and time. Whether it will be strong enough to cause the displacement of single environment data protection suppliers is going to be interesting to see.
Like Clumio but base product available
The overall HYCU strategy is similar to that of VC-funded Clumio but, unlike this just-out-of stealth startup, HYCU product is here. It already has 1,200 customers in 62 countries using its products. Protege comes out in a week or two, along with support for Nutanix Mine secondary storage The AWS and Azure support will arrive, we understand, as 2020 progresses. It is ready to serve a market that Clumio is helping to prime.
HYCU revenues are growing 300 per cent year-on-year and it expects to be profitable next year. There is no massive VC investment to pay off either, further differentiating it from Clumio, and also from Druva. We can speculate about further product capability expansion in the data management area but that, if it happens, will be a 2021 and beyond effort.
For now, expect HYCU to be a fully fledged and centrally managed provider of general on-premises and multiple public cloud data protection, migration and disaster recovery services by the end of next year.
