Videos

Christophe: Welcome to Data Protection Conversations. My name is Christophe Bertrand and I'm a senior analyst with ESG. I am joined today by Simon Taylor, who is the CEO of HYCU. Welcome, Simon.

Simon: Well, thank you for having me.

Christophe: My pleasure. So tell us a little bit of HYCU, which is not a Japanese company despite the Japanese name.

Simon: Absolutely. You know, HYCU is a very interesting company. We are a software company entirely focused on purpose-built multi-cloud backup and recovery. The company is focused on hybrid cloud and hyper-converged. And we thought about the fact that if we're going to build elegant data protection solutions, they've got to be elegant, they've got to be able to take an enormous amount of data and manage them really effectively, much like a Japanese HYCU poem, "Big things, small packages, very elegantly packaged."

And that's really where the name comes from.

Christophe: So tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in the industry from your perspective. Tell us about your customers.

Simon: Sure. You know, as a multi-cloud backup and recovery provider, we focus on two major areas of the market. The first is we offer the world's only purpose-built backup and recovery product for Nutanix, and we also offer the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery service for Google Cloud customers. So really what we do is we go out and we target Nutanix customers and GCP customers.

You know, there's a lot of options out there in terms of legacy data protection. But if you're moving to Google Cloud, if you're moving to Nutanix, you want the latest and greatest. You want something that's purpose-built for that platform. You know, in just two years, we are in now 43 countries and have over a thousand customers. So it's been absolutely terrific not only to see our own growth but to see how multi-cloud has really taken off.

Everything from Nutanix customers to the GCP customer base, they're becoming more sophisticated, they're becoming larger, and we're thrilled to be along for the ride.

Christophe: Well, that's very impressive. Forty-three countries, a thousand customers, two years. But is it really two years? What's your history? You've been around for a while, right?

Simon: You know too much. It's a great question. You know, actually, our background is incredibly compelling and interesting. HYCU spun out of a larger company called Comtrade, which has actually been around for about 25 years. That company had a thousand software engineers that for 20-plus years was focused on building backup and recovery software for large blue chip vendors across the world.

So as an outsourced service provider, this large group of engineers built up a tremendous amount of data protection expertise. I came along and sort of said, "Okay.You know what? We're going to build our own pure-play software company leveraging all of this expertise." We took 300 of the top data protection engineers in the business, we moved them out, we created a brand new company called HYCU, and we began building our own HYCU branded products.

So we're actually leveraging over two decades of software engineering expertise in data protection and using that same team, which now works directly for HYCU, to build the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix and for Google.

Christophe: Well, that's very impressive because I haven't seen many startups this way that have 20 years of experience and 2 years of existence. So it's a very interesting background. So you've talked about what you're doing today. Can you give us a glimpse as to what you're going to be doing in the next few months, in the next few quarters?

Simon: Yeah, sure. So, you know, if we take a step back and we think about kind of the backup and the data protection space in general, you know, I always like to say that in the past, people have always built kind of point-in-time solutions. So go back through history, you know, the way that a data center looked and was configured ultimately led companies to say, "Oh, I'm going to build a backup product specifically for that."

So, you know, when it was all about Unix, you know, Veritas built a great product for that. When it was all about Windows, deploying Windows and agents on servers, you know, there was a great company for that. Then virtualization and VMware, there was a great company for that. But now we've entered this new world of multi-cloud, right? It's not one thing anymore, is it? There's data on-premise, there's data up in the public cloud.

You might have five or six different clouds at play. So our vision and our strategy is actually to build purpose-built backup and recovery services for each cloud and then roll all that data back under one single pane of glass. So you get the experience of managing your individual cloud platform, but you also allow IT the ability to provide all the governance, compliance, and control.

Christophe: Excellent. Well, that's not a small order. It's a pretty tall order. So we'll be keeping an eye on you and, of course, certainly expect to hear more from your customers as well and the next new platforms you'll be supporting.

Simon: Well, we thank you for it.

Christophe: Well, thank you, Simon, and thank you, everybody, for joining us and we'll see you on the next Data Protection Conversation.