StartUp Circle: How is Clumio nurturing the SaaS Data protection segment in India?

Clumio: As the pandemic has accelerated organizations in every industry to digitize and adopt cloud technology, there is an increased cloud dependency and need for building that cloud infrastructure with a robust security architecture. Having good data backup and recovery strategy and tools in place will be essential for every organization to be able to leverage the full potential of the cloud, in the new normal. As the use and prevalence of Software-as-a-Service in today’s modern IT infrastructure is undergoing strong adoption, it is important that there are no gaps in a backup.

Thus, CIOL in talks with Sandeep Soni who leads India’s strategic charter for Clumio and its expansion alongside driving innovations for an ‘all cloud world’. Excerpts of the interview:

How does Clumio’s platform work?

Clumio is a secure, backup as a service for the enterprises that eliminate the complexity of infrastructure management with authentic SaaS. The service consolidates the protection of data centres with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage - or even buy at all. On their journey to the cloud, they can use the same service to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services such as EBS and RDS.

As organizations generate volumes of business data across clouds, they must efficiently protect it as it scales. Clumio’s cloud data platform architecture was designed with this in mind, bringing the cloud values of scalability, integrated support, economics, and faster access to innovation.

Can you tell us about the journey of the company, people behind it and the inception of the idea?

Clumio was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Poojan Kumar, co-founder and former CEO of PernixData (acquired by Nutanix), alongside Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil who bring strong engineering and leadership backgrounds from VMware and Nutanix.

To build a long-standing enterprise company, you need to go after a big market with innovative technology and you want to take advantage of a discontinuity in the sector. The big discontinuity in the enterprise sector is the move of computing from on-premises data centres to the public cloud, pioneered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And as this move happens, the next generation of enterprise companies are going to be companies that deliver SaaS services on top of the new infrastructure, which is the public cloud.

And that’s what we set out to do at Clumio. We wanted to build the next big SaaS cloud company, on the public cloud. And the space we chose for ourselves was backup and data protection. This is because the most valuable asset for any enterprise is the data and that data is now fragmented across on-premises data centres, public clouds and other SaaS data sources such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc. And we wanted to build a company that protects data irrespective of where it resides. And we wanted to build this service with simplicity in mind as we didn’t want our customers to be in the business of data protection themselves and instead rely on a service built on the cloud-like Clumio to deliver their data protection needs.

Is India nurturing as a niche SaaS Data protection segment?

Yes, India though still in the early stages is showing prospects of nurturing the SaaS data protection segment. SaaS and cloud-based offerings are seeing a higher adoption in general in India as well as across the globe. In India, particularly SaaS-based outsourcing solutions are in general seeing at least three times the growth than the regular in-house solutions. As more and more verticals adopt digital solutions, the need for protecting the data that is being generated will also grow. SaaS-based data protection with it’s a lower barrier to entry and predictable costs offers a simplified learning curve, hence demystifying a complex domain.

What will be the shifts that the Indian software industry will see? What more can be done to adapt to the changes?

The Indian government is emphasizing on better technology-enabled delivery mechanisms for a multitude of government projects. Further, with the new digital India and Startup India initiatives being launched, the domestic market for software services has very good prospects.

Revenue from the digital segment is expected to comprise 40-45% of the forecasted software industry revenue by 2025. The cloud market in India was expected to grow three-fold by 2022 with the growing adoption of big data, analytics, artificial intelligence and IoT. This growth will only get accelerated now. The data protection market for all this data will then also become an imminent requirement for businesses, thus opening up the market for transformational and innovative service offerings which satisfy these needs.

How has COVID disrupted businesses and created a larger need for recovery and backup?

When planning for data protection, most of the focus is on scenarios involving site outages and in extreme cases, regional disasters. Very few would have anticipated an event that reached every corner of the globe as it has in this pandemic. Healthcare systems and public safety organizations are seeing interruptions in supply chains for hardware, and lockdowns are preventing access to data centres to do hardware installs anyway.

COVID-19 is already proving to be a theme that has one of the largest concentrations of cyber-attacks that we have ever seen. City and state governments, along with private, public and higher-ed school systems, are the most frequently targeted and most vulnerable. With work from home and remote learning being common scenarios now, the attack surface for these organizations has been greatly increased.

Leveraging the public cloud and the many available enterprise SaaS applications is a way that any organization facing challenges in these areas can quickly plan for these new realities. In the case of data protection, choosing the right solution can give users instant access to data protection capabilities to ensure SLAs can be achieved even when capacity runs low on existing systems. It also gives those most vulnerable to ransomware attacks a rapidly deployable, “air-gapped” solution that ensures that they have a good copy of their data in the event of a ransomware attack.

What has been your business growth till now?

Clumio’s business is growing rapidly as we add new customers to our service and existing customers increase the number of data sources they protect with Clumio. As a private company, we do not release specific financial details.

What are your future plans?

Clumio continues to redefine data protection for an all-cloud world, is creating a strong base in India already having 50 employees and planning to expand to more than 70 by the end of 2020.

Tell us about Clumio's innovations and solutions and the R&D centre.

The Clumio Research and Development Center in India is a strategic investment for the company to innovate and build SaaS-based data protection solutions. To ensure steady progress through excellence across products and customer experiences, Clumio is hiring bright individuals to fill roles across Software Engineering, Cloud Operations and Customer Support and Success.

“When multi-national companies go to India, they generally go as an afterthought. Their ‘when’ and ‘why’ are different from Clumio. ‘When’ is very late for them, sometimes 10 years in. For instance, a $45B collaboration software company went only a couple years ago. The ‘why’ is often only for cost reasons. Clumio is unique in that we went to India within 18 months of our founding. The ‘why’ was very pure - to tap into the big candidate pool in India and not for cost reasons - it’s for the talent. This will enable us to have the Clumio Research and Development Center be part of the DNA of the company - not an afterthought.”

Please comment on the post-Covid all-cloud world.

Digitization and more digitization is the future, and it is here now. It’s difficult to say with certainty what the post covid world for running a business will look like, as we are all learning as we face this situation. Businesses will still need to run with the same high velocity, but they will need to find ways to balance efficiency with resiliency as active workplace collaboration takes a hit.

Talking specifically about the all-cloud world, with many verticals forced to adopt digitization sooner than they had planned for, we need to think of data privacy, protection and governance in a much more serious and holistic way than ever before.

Can you share your recent funding details?

Clumio was born out of Sutter Hill Ventures and lead investor, Mike Speiser. We are following the same blueprint Mike created, which built Snowflake Computing ($5B valuation) and Pure Storage, '09 IPO. We recently closed a $135M Series C funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures' MD Mike Speiser and new investor Altimeter Capital. Existing backer Index Ventures participated in the latest raise, which brings the company’s total raised to date to $186 million.